Year of Graduation
2021
Level of Access
Open Access Thesis
Embargo Period
5-20-2021
Department or Program
Physics and Astronomy
First Advisor
Jeffrey Hyde
Abstract
There are predictions for cosmological gravitational wave backgrounds from reheating based on various models. But, these predictions do not address the question of how an observed spectrum relates back to an unknown model or parameter. Given this problem, we have numerically and analytically investigated a variety of chaotic inflation models and their gravitational wave spectra. In doing so, we found a power law relation between gravitational wave peak frequency and an underlying chaotic inflation parameter. We found a two-class amplitude puzzle related to how strongly a matter producing field is coupled to the inflaton. We estimated the parameter describing how quadrupolar the gravitational wave source's energy density to good agreement with previous estimates.