Gravitational waves

Induced gravitational waves from slow-roll inflation after an enhancing phase

The primordial spectrum of fluctuations may present a large peak as a result of enhancing features during inflation. This may include, but is not limited to, bumps in the inflaton's potential, phases of ultra-slow-roll or turns in multi-field space. …

The unexplored early universe

Illustration of the early universe in the context of the primordial black hole scenario and induced gravitational waves. Figure made by myself with Goodnotes. The early universe and gravitational waves In the last decades we learned a lot about the early universe. We are certain that the universe, since its first seconds, was so dense and hot that all particles blended in a uniform soup.

Gravitational waves from dark matter isocurvature

The primordial fluctuations on large scales are adiabatic, but on smaller scales this need not be the case. Here we derive the general analytical framework to compute the stochastic gravitational wave background induced by primordial cold dark matter …

Were recently reported MHz events planet mass primordial black hole mergers?

A bulk acoustic wave cavity as high frequency gravitational wave antenna has recently detected two rare events at $5.5$MHz. Assuming that the detected events are due to gravitational waves, their characteristic strain amplitude lies at about …

Expansion history-dependent oscillations in the scalar-induced gravitational wave background

Oscillations in the frequency profile of the scalar-induced contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background are a characteristic signal for small-scale features during inflation. We investigate how this oscillatory frequency profile is …

Finding out what the baby universe may have been up to

Outreach talk for the European Researcher's Night 2021, venetonight at Padova.

Scalar induced gravitational waves review

We provide a review on the state-of-the-art of gravitational waves induced by primordial fluctuations, so-called induced gravitational waves. We present the intuitive physics behind induced gravitational waves and we revisit and unify the general …

Exploring Evaporating Primordial Black Holes with Gravitational Waves

Primordial black holes (PBHs) from the early Universe have been connected with the nature of dark matter and can significantly affect cosmological history. We show that coincidence dark radiation and density fluctuation gravitational wave signatures …

Probing non-Gaussianities with the high frequency tail of induced gravitational waves

We investigate in detail the spectrum of gravitational waves induced by a peaked primordial curvature power spectrum generated in single-field inflationary models. We argue that the fNL parameter can be inferred by measuring the high frequency …

Approximate gauge independence of the induced gravitational wave spectrum

Gravitational waves (GWs) induced by scalar curvature fluctuations are an important source of the cosmological GW background and a crucial counterpart of the primordial black hole scenario. However, doubts have been cast on the theoretically …