Fabrizio Rompineve - Fundamental (new) physics and gravitational waves

Wednesday 3 Jul 2019, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

Marc Manera (IFAE), Pere Masjuan (IFAE), Stefano Terzo (IFAE)

Since the first detections of gravitational waves from binary systems of black holes and neutron stars, it has become clear that a lot more can be learnt about the physics of these objects and of the late Universe.
However, can gravitational waves tell us something about particle/fundamental physics and the early Universe? In this talk, we will try to provide some positive answers to this question. In particular, we will focus on gravitational waves which may have been originated as the Universe was less than a second old. In this context, two physical phenomena which could have generated observable gravitational radiation are inflation and cosmological phase transitions.
We discuss the possibilities of a future detection of gravitational waves from these phenomena as well as the potential impact on our understanding of fundamental physics.