Smoking-gun signatures of bounce cosmology from echoes of relic gravitational waves

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Mian, Cai, Yi-Fu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhu, Mian
Cai, Yi-Fu
author_facet Zhu, Mian
Cai, Yi-Fu
contents We report a novel feature of relic gravitational waves (GWs) in non-singular bounce cosmologies that is testable in light of GWs astronomy. In non-singular bounce cosmologies, the effective potential $M_p^2 a^{\prime \prime}/a$ that governs the evolution of primordial GWs contains two peaks due to the existence of contraction phase prior to the standard expansion phase. Accordingly, relic GWs interference between the two peaks, resulting in a distinctive oscillatory feature in the spectrum, analog to the resonant tunneling effect in quantum mechanics. As a result, the GWs spectrum exhibits an oscillatory patterns on high frequecy regime, distinctive to other cosmological scenarios such as inflation. We show that the amplitude of GWs spectrum is high enough to reach the sensitivity of current and forthcoming GWs instruments, making our predictions falsifiable. Hence, our finding offers a promising way to experimentally test the non-singular bounce scenarios and search for new physics in early universe cosmologies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13924
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Smoking-gun signatures of bounce cosmology from echoes of relic gravitational waves
Zhu, Mian
Cai, Yi-Fu
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
We report a novel feature of relic gravitational waves (GWs) in non-singular bounce cosmologies that is testable in light of GWs astronomy. In non-singular bounce cosmologies, the effective potential $M_p^2 a^{\prime \prime}/a$ that governs the evolution of primordial GWs contains two peaks due to the existence of contraction phase prior to the standard expansion phase. Accordingly, relic GWs interference between the two peaks, resulting in a distinctive oscillatory feature in the spectrum, analog to the resonant tunneling effect in quantum mechanics. As a result, the GWs spectrum exhibits an oscillatory patterns on high frequecy regime, distinctive to other cosmological scenarios such as inflation. We show that the amplitude of GWs spectrum is high enough to reach the sensitivity of current and forthcoming GWs instruments, making our predictions falsifiable. Hence, our finding offers a promising way to experimentally test the non-singular bounce scenarios and search for new physics in early universe cosmologies.
title Smoking-gun signatures of bounce cosmology from echoes of relic gravitational waves
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13924