Gravitational waves are difficult to detect, but - unlike light - they travel through everything, even the dense and hot plasma of the early universe. The search for gravitational waves is then also a search for signals from the first moments of the Big Bang. Theories which extend the Standard Model of particle physics to account for dark matter and the excess of matter over antimatter often create gravitational waves at phase transitions, a change in the state of matter at very high temperatures and very early times. This project aims to refine the methods for calculating the characteristic frequencies of these waves from the underlying theory, and to develop algorithms for the future space-based gravitational wave observatory LISA to help it search for this signal.

2024

2028