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Title: Thermal gravitational-wave background in the general pre-inflationary scenario

Journal Article · · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
; ;  [1];  [2]
  1. CAS Key Laboratory for Researches in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, Anhui 230026 (China)
  2. Department of Astronomy, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875 (China)

We investigate the primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) in the general scenario where the inflation is preceded by a pre-inflationary stage with the effective equation of state w . Comparing with the results in the usual inflationary models, the power spectrum of PGWs is modified in two aspects: one is the mixture of the perturbation modes caused by he presence of the pre-inflationary period, and the other is the thermal initial state formed at the Planck era of the early Universe. By investigating the observational imprints of these modifications on the B-mode polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, we obtain the constraints on the conformal temperature of the thermal gravitational-wave background T <5.01× 10{sup −4} Mpc{sup −1} and a tensor-to-scalar ratio r <0.084 (95% confident level), which follows the bounds on total number of e-folds N >63.5 for the model with w =1/3, and N >65.7 for that with w =1. By taking into account various noises and the foreground radiations, we forecast the detection possibility of the thermal gravitational-wave background by the future CMBPol mission, and find that if r >0.01, the detection is possible as long as T >1.5× 10{sup −4} Mpc{sup −1}. However, the effect of different w is quite small, and it seems impossible to determine its value from the potential observations of CMBPol mission.

OSTI ID:
22680060
Journal Information:
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2017, Issue 01; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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