A Falsifiable Fingerprint of Cosmological Stasis: Detecting Imprints of Stasis in the Inflationary Gravitational Wave Background

by Anne-Katherine Burns (UC Irvine)

Wednesday 21 Oct 2026, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-011 - TH common room (CERN)

Cosmological stasis is a dynamical fixed point of the early universe in which the fractional energy densities of multiple components stay constant despite Hubble expansion, holding the total equation of state, w_s, fixed over many e-folds. Because w_s is exactly constant, the tensor mode equation reduces to an exact Bessel equation, and the imprint of any stasis epoch on the inflationary gravitational wave background follows in closed form from just two inputs: w_s and the duration ΔN. In this talk I will present this template, which applies uniformly across every known microphysical realization of stasis. I will discuss the fact that when we map this signature onto current and planned detectors, BBO and DECIGO can detect enhancement scenarios with w_s > 1/3 down to a tensor-to-scalar ratio of ~10^(-9), decoupling the signal from the tensor amplitude. Finally, I will present our results for recurrent stasis. In these scenarios, N successive epochs produce a comb of spectral features whose amplitude steps depend only on local physics, each supplying an independent test of the same relation and making the comb the sharpest discriminator against early matter domination, kination, and early dark energy.