RESUMO
Detection of a gravitational-wave signal of non-astrophysical origin would be a landmark discovery, potentially providing a significant clue to some of our most basic, big-picture scientific questions about the Universe. In this white paper, we survey the leading early-Universe mechanisms that may produce a detectable signal-including inflation, phase transitions, topological defects, as well as primordial black holes-and highlight the connections to fundamental physics. We review the complementarity with collider searches for new physics, and multimessenger probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe.
RESUMO
Quantum scale invariance in the UV has been recently advocated as an attractive way of solving the gauge hierarchy problem arising in the standard model. We explore the cosmological signatures at the electroweak scale when the breaking of scale invariance originates from a hidden sector and is mediated to the standard model by gauge interactions (gauge mediation). These scenarios, while being hard to distinguish from the standard model at LHC, can give rise to a strong electroweak phase transition leading to the generation of a large stochastic gravitational wave signal in possible reach of future space-based detectors such as eLISA and BBO. This relic would be the cosmological imprint of the breaking of scale invariance in nature.
