The Quest for Gravity Wave B-modes

TL;DR

This paper reviews the efforts to detect primordial gravitational wave B-modes in the CMB polarization, highlighting the history, experimental strategies, and current experiments aiming to observe signals from cosmic inflation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and current state of polarization measurements targeting gravity wave imprints from the early universe.

Findings

Summary of polarization measurement history

Analysis of experimental optimization techniques

Overview of current experimental approaches

Abstract

One of the most exciting quests in all of contemporary science is to find hints that in the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big-Bang the Universe hyper-inflated by a factor of \sim 10^{60}. Such inflation will have injected gravity waves into the fabric of spacetime which will in turn have left a faint imprint in the polarization pattern of the Cosmic Microwave Background. This paper describes the history of polarization measurement, the experimental optimization of this latest search for the gravity wave imprint, and the current round of experiments and their various approaches to the challenge.