Detecting primordial features with LISA

Understand

Oscillations in the frequency profile of the stochastic gravitational wave background are a characteristic prediction of small-scale features during inflation.

• In this paper we present a first investigation of the detection prospects of such oscillations with the upcoming space-based gravitational wave observatory LISA.
• As a proof of principle, we show for a selection of feature signals that the oscillations can be reconstructed with LISA, employing a method based on principal component analysis.
• We then perform a Fisher forecast for the parameters describing the oscillatory signal.