Studying Inflation with Future Space-Based Gravitational Wave Detectors

TL;DR

This paper explores how future space-based gravitational wave detectors can provide valuable insights into the early universe, including inflationary parameters and reheating temperature, through detailed statistical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis framework to estimate inflationary parameters using future GW detectors, highlighting dependencies on detector noise and frequency range.

Findings

Potential to measure reheating temperature accurately

Constraints on inflationary gravitational wave amplitude and spectral index

Dependence of measurement precision on detector noise and frequency

Abstract

Motivated by recent progress in our understanding of the $B$-mode polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB), which provides important information about the inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), we study the possibility to acquire information about the early universe using future space-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors. We perform a detailed statistical analysis to estimate how well we can determine the reheating temperature after inflation as well as the amplitude, the tensor spectral index, and the running of the inflationary gravitational waves. We discuss how the accuracies depend on noise parameters of the detector and the minimum frequency available in the analysis. Implication of such a study on the test of inflation models is also discussed.