Speaker
Description
The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black hole mergers has opened an exciting new avenue for cosmological research. Because GWs interact very weakly with matter, there is potential to observe primordial GWs among the signals captured by current and future detectors. This provides a unique opportunity to probe the early universe physics. Primordial GWs are typically generated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, and due to their quantum nature, they manifest as a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). A notable component of this background comes from the so called ‘scalar-induced’ gravitational waves (SIGWs), which arise from second-order effects and the coupling of scalar perturbations.
In this talk I will discuss the motivations to how detection of SIGW is useful. My main work has been around understanding how we can use SIGWs to probe beyond-gravity theories. We study the SIGW source term with correction w.r.t. to GR using the f(R) gravity theory.
Another motivation is understanding PBHs. The primordial fluctuations responsible for SIGWs can also collapse into primordial black holes (PBHs), presenting an additional route to study the formation and abundance of these black holes in the early universe.
