Detection of early-universe gravitational-wave signatures and fundamental physics.

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.

Unifying Inflation with the Axion, Dark Matter, Baryogenesis, and the Seesaw Mechanism.

A minimal extension of the standard model (SM) with a single new mass scale and providing a complete and consistent picture of particle physics and cosmology up to the Planck scale is presented. We add to the SM three right-handed SM-singlet neutrinos, a new vectorlike color triplet fermion, and a complex SM-singlet scalar σ that stabilizes the Higgs potential and whose vacuum expectation value at ∼10^{11} GeV breaks lepton number and a Peccei-Quinn symmetry simultaneously. Primordial inflation is produced by a combination of σ (nonminimally coupled to the scalar curvature) and the SM Higgs boson. Baryogenesis proceeds via thermal leptogenesis. At low energies, the model reduces to the SM, augmented by seesaw-generated neutrino masses, plus the axion, which solves the strong CP problem and accounts for the dark matter in the Universe. The model predicts a minimum value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r≃0.004, running of the scalar spectral index α≃-7×10^{-4}, the axion mass m_{A}∼100 µeV, and cosmic axion background radiation corresponding to an increase of the effective number of relativistic neutrinos of ∼0.03. It can be probed decisively by the next generation of cosmic microwave background and axion dark matter experiments.