Bridging the Gap: Spectral Distortions meet Gravitational Waves

TL;DR

This paper discusses how spectral distortions and gravitational waves can jointly advance our understanding of the early universe, offering complementary insights into primordial phenomena and bridging observational gaps across different frequency ranges.

Contribution

It introduces the connection between spectral distortions and gravitational waves, highlighting their combined potential to probe early universe physics across a wide frequency spectrum.

Findings

Spectral distortions provide insights into primordial plasma conditions before recombination.

Gravitational waves reveal dynamics of black holes, neutron stars, and early universe inflation.

Coupling between GWs and SDs offers a unique probe of early universe processes.

Abstract

This talk has the goal of introducing two upcoming exciting avenues of discovery in precision Cosmology: spectral distortions (SDs) and gravitational waves (GWs). The former signals offer a clear window into the state of the primordial plasma at times prior to recombination, and thus sheds light on small-scale primordial perturbations, dark matter decay and black hole formation to just mention a few scenarios. The latter signals, which are already offering new insights into the landscape of black hole and neutron star mergers, will reveal intricate dynamics of the early universe including primordial black holes, inflationary potentials, and even reheating dynamics. An elegant link is drawn between these two future observations since primordial GW backgrounds will source SDs, a coupling which offers unique insight to over six decades of GW frequencies. More importantly the SD visibility window bridges the gap between astrophysical high- and cosmological low-frequency measurements. This means SDs will not only complement other GW observations, but will be the sole probe of physical processes at certain scales.