Probing the reheating temperature of the universe with a gravitational wave background

Abstract

Thermal history of the universe after big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is well understood both theoretically and observationally, and recent cosmological observations also begin to reveal the inflationary dynamics. However, the epoch between inflation and BBN is scarcely known. In this paper we show that the detection of the stochastic gravitational wave background around 1Hz provides useful information about thermal history well before BBN. In particular, the reheating temperature of the universe may be determined by future space-based laser interferometer experiments such as DECIGO and/or BBO if it is around 10^{6-9} GeV, depending on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and dilution factor $F$.