Princeton University/Institute for Advanced Study Cosmology Seminar/Group Meeting

Abstract: Upcoming gravitational-wave detectors offer unprecedented potential for probing early-universe physics. They are expected to be sensitive to a wide range of primordial stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds generated by processes such as inflationary dynamics, phase transitions, and cosmic strings. A central challenge is separating these cosmological backgrounds from those produced by unresolved astrophysical sources.  

I will review the astrophysical contributions to the SGWB and examine how these astrophysical components affect sensitivity to early-universe-induced backgrounds, highlighting the difficulty posed by multiple overlapping signals.  

To address this, I will introduce a new method that exploits the non-Gaussian structure in gravitational-wave data using the wavelet scattering transform. This approach can extract statistical information that is inaccessible to standard analysis techniques.  

Finally, I will provide a pedagogical explanation of the mathematical framework underlying the scattering transform and highlight its physical interpretation using our recent analytical results, clarifying how scattering coefficients capture and characterize non-Gaussian signatures in gravitational-wave data.