Probing High Energy Particle Physics with the Cosmic Gravitational Microwave Background - Jan Schütte-Engel (UC Berkeley)

Abstract: The thermal plasma in the early universe produced a guaranteed stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background, which peaks today in the microwave regime and was dubbed the cosmic gravitational microwave background (CGMB). I show that the CGMB spectrum encodes fundamental information about particle physics and gravity at ultra high energies. In particular, one can determine from the CGMB spectrum the maximum temperature of the universe and the effective degrees of freedom at the maximum temperature. I also discuss briefly how quantum gravity effects arise in the CGMB spectrum as corrections to the leading order result.