27–31 Aug 2018
Asia/Seoul timezone

Non-Gaussian gravitational waves from inflation

28 Aug 2018, 11:00
30m
Main Hall

Main Hall

IBS Science and Culture Center, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, korea

Speaker

Dr Eiichiro Komatsu (Max Planck Institute)

Description

It has been widely assumed that detection of primordial gravitational waves from inflation in, for example, B-mode polarisation of the cosmic microwave background, immediately implies discovery of the quantum nature of spacetime. While this statement is true for the vacuum solution, it does not apply if the gravitational waves originate from the matter fields. How can we distinguish between these two origins? The answer is non-Gaussinaity. We show that the gravitational waves from SU(2) gauge fields coupled to a spectator axion field during inflation are highly non-Gaussian with a characteristic shape, whereas those from the vacuum are only weakly non-Gaussian.

Presentation materials