No Arabic abstract
The Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (SGWB) is expected to be a key observable for Gravitational-Wave (GW) interferometry. Its detection will open a new window on early Universe cosmology, on the astrophysics of compact objects and, as shown in this Letter, on the particle physics content of the Universe. In this Letter we show that, besides their effects on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and on Large Scale Structure (LSS), relativistic particles in the early Universe leave a clear imprint on the anisotropies of the SGWB. In particular we show that a change in the number of decoupled relativistic particles shifts the angular power spectrum of the SGWB, as both the Sachs-Wolfe (SW) and the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) terms are affected. Being very large-angle effects, these lead to new testable predictions for future GW interferometers.
In this work we analyse in detail the possibility of using small and intermediate-scale gravitational wave anisotropies to constrain the inflationary particle content. First, we develop a phenomenological approach focusing on anisotropies generated by primordial tensor-tensor-scalar and purely gravitational non-Gaussianities. We highlight the quantities that play a key role in determining the detectability of the signal. To amplify the power of anisotropies as a probe of early universe physics, we consider cross-correlations with CMB temperature anisotropies. We assess the size of the signal from inflationary interactions against so-called induced anisotropies. In order to arrive at realistic estimates, we obtain the projected constraints on the non-linear primordial parameter $F_{rm NL}$ for several upcoming gravitational wave probes in the presence of the astrophysical gravitational wave background. We further illustrate our findings by considering a concrete inflationary realisation and use it to underscore a few subtleties in the phenomenological analysis.
The Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB) is expected to be a key observable for Gravitational Wave (GW) interferometry. Its detection will open a new window on early universe cosmology and on the astrophysics of compact objects. Using a Boltzmann approach, we study the angular anisotropies of the GW energy density, which is an important tool to disentangle the different cosmological and astrophysical contributions to the SGWB. Anisotropies in the cosmological background are imprinted both at its production, and by GW propagation through the large-scale scalar and tensor perturbations of the universe. The first contribution is not present in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation (as the universe is not transparent to photons before recombination), causing an order one dependence of the anisotropies on frequency. Moreover, we provide a new method to characterize the cosmological SGWB through its possible deviation from a Gaussian statistics. In particular, the SGWB will become a new probe of the primordial non-Gaussianity of the large-scale cosmological perturbations.
Stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds, predicted in many models of the early universe and also generated by various astrophysical processes, are a powerful probe of the Universe. The spectral shape is key information to distinguish the origin of the background since different production mechanisms predict different shapes of the spectrum. In this paper, we investigate how precisely future gravitational wave detectors can determine the spectral shape using single and broken power-law templates. We consider the detector network of Advanced-LIGO, Advanced-Virgo and KAGRA and the space-based gravitational-wave detector DECIGO, and estimate the parameter space which could be explored by these detectors. We find that, when the spectrum changes its slope in the frequency range of the sensitivity, the broken power-law templates dramatically improve the $chi^2$ fit compared with the single power-law templates and help to measure the shape with a good precision.
We study the sensitivity of a pair of Einstein Telescopes (ET) (hypothetically located at the two sites currently under consideration for ET) to the anisotropies of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB). We focus on the $ell =0,2,4$ multipoles of an expansion of the SGWB in spherical harmonics, since the sensitivity to other multipoles is suppressed due to the fact that this pair of detector operates in a regime for which the product between the observed frequency and the distance between the two sites is much smaller than one. In this regime, the interferometer overlap functions for the anisotropic signal acquire very simple analytic expressions. These expressions can also be applied to any other pairs of interferometers (each one of arbitrary opening angle between its two arms) operating in this regime. Once the measurements at the vertices of the two sites are optimally combined, the sensitivity to the multipoles of the SGWB depends only on the latitude of the two sites, on the difference of their longitude, but not on the orientation of their arms.
A gravitational wave stochastic background of astrophysical origin may have resulted from the superposition of a large number of unresolved sources since the beginning of stellar activity. Its detection would put very strong constrains on the physical properties of compact objects, the initial mass function or the star formation history. On the other hand, it could be a noise that would mask the stochastic background of cosmological origin. We review the main astrophysical processes able to produce a stochastic background and discuss how it may differ from the primordial contribution by its statistical properties. Current detection methods are also presented.