Understanding the fundaments of the universe - listening to the symphony of gravitational waves
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After centuries of carefully performed experiments and groundbreaking theories validating and constructively building upon each other, physicists obtained a comprehensive understanding of the Universe. However, this profound knowledge of the Universe pertains to only a tiny fraction of the entire Universe, i.e. barely 5%. Meanwhile we are left searching for the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
One potential way to learn more about these concepts is to listen to the gravitational wave background originating from the earliest epochs of our Universe.
However, to have confidence in a future detection we need exquisite knowledge of the quality of our detectors data.
In this talk I will highlight some of the interesting physics we can study by searching for a gravitational wave background. I will discuss the strong evidence for a first signal detection which was found by several pulsar timing arrays as well as how lightning strikes could become a dominant background for the search for a gravitational wave background using Earth-based detectors.