Speaker
Description
The field of gravitational-wave astronomy has seen rapid and impressive progress since the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015; and yet the exciting journey has just begun. In the coming decades, gravitational waves will continue to expand their role as an indispensable tool for astrophysics and cosmology and advance to a primary probe of fundamental physics in the 21st century. In light of these prospects, this lecture will highlight some of the exciting new physics scenarios that we might be able to discover in the gravitational-wave sky, with a special focus on gravitational waves from the early Universe. Specifically, it will cover gravitational waves from cosmic inflation, first-order phase transitions, and cosmic defects. The lecture will conclude with a brief discussion of the recently announced NANOGrav signal and its possible interpretations in terms of primordial gravitational waves.
