Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves and eLISA/NGO: Phase Transitions, Cosmic Strings and Other Sources

TL;DR

This paper reviews cosmological gravitational wave backgrounds, focusing on phase transitions and cosmic strings, and assesses eLISA/NGO's potential to detect these signals with improved computational methods.

Contribution

It provides refined calculations of gravitational wave backgrounds from phase transitions and cosmic strings, enhancing previous models and evaluating eLISA/NGO's detection prospects.

Findings

Improved models for gravitational wave backgrounds from phase transitions.

Enhanced predictions for cosmic string-induced gravitational waves.

Assessment of eLISA/NGO's sensitivity to these cosmological signals.

Abstract

We review several cosmological backgrounds of gravitational waves accessible to direct-detection experiments, with a special emphasis on those backgrounds due to first-order phase transitions and networks of cosmic (super-)strings. For these two particular sources, we revisit in detail the computation of the gravitational wave background and improve the results of previous works in the literature. We apply our results to identify the scientific potential of the NGO/eLISA mission of ESA regarding the detectability of cosmological backgrounds.