In a Physics Review Letters paper published on Dec 15th, an international research team, led by Cai Yifu, Professor of the University of Science and Technology of China, and his collaborators discovered the hypothetical possibility of resonantly generating primordial gravitational waves within the high energy physics when the universe was in the babyhood. The originally invisible gravitational wave signals can be amplified by parametric resonance by 4 to 6 orders of magnitude or even larger through this phenomenon, and then become likely to be probed by primordial gravitational wave detectors, hence, validating some theoretical models of the very early universe that are "inaccesible" in traditional observational windows.
In the baby universe, all matters once existed as extremely tiny elementary particles. The temperature of the baby universe was far beyound the highest temperature (energy scale) that human can reach in any high-energy experiments. Therefore, the new physics of this period is called the desert zone of high-energy physics.
At present, the major method for exploring the origin of the universe is to search for primordial gravitatiaonal waves, whose magnitude is directly determined by the energy scale of the baby universe. Therefore, capturing primordial gravitational waves has become almost the only chance for humans to reach new physics at high-energy scales beyond the standard model of particle physics. However, if inflation occurred in the desert zone of high-energy physics, the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves will be too small to be detected. Thus, the traditional academic perspective considers it almost as a "mission impossible" to search for primordial gravitational waves and the related new physics in this energy scale
To read more, click here.