The Gravitational-Wave Physics II: Progress

Understand

It has been a half-decade since the first direct detection of gravitational waves, which signifies the coming of the era of the gravitational-wave astronomy and gravitational-wave cosmology.

• The increasing number of the detected gravitational-wave events has revealed the promising capability of constraining various aspects of cosmology, astronomy, and gravity.
• Due to the limited space in this review article, we will briefly summarize the recent progress over the past five years, but with a special focus on some of our own work for the Key Project ``Physics associated with the gravitational waves'' supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
• In particular, (1) we have presented the mechanism of the gravitational-wave production during some physical processes of the early Universe, such as inflation, preheating and phase transition, and the cosmological implications of gravitational-wave measurements; (2) we have put constraints on the neutron star maximum mass according to GW170817 observations; (3) we have developed a numerical relativity algorithm based on the finite element method and a waveform model for the binary black hole coalescence along an eccentric orbit.