Second Order Gravitational Waves in Hilltop Type Inflation Models
Alabidi, Laila (Yukawa Inst. of Theoretical Physics)

Expected data sets from the upcoming PLANCK satellite will further bound the cosmological parameters, specifically the tensor fraction, spectral index and the running of the spectral index. As previous works have shown, relying on these parameters alone will still leave us with a degree of degeneracy between the many models of Inflation. As such, we need to expand the pool of observable parameters in order to further narrow the field. In this work we focus on Hilltop type models of inflation which have been shown to lead to an enhanced spectrum on small scales. Whether the spectrum on small scales can be measured in the future is debatable, and so we look to another signature of the enhanced spectrum. It has been shown that the gravitational wave spectrum sourced by first order scalar perturbations may be within reach of gravitational wave detectors, and so we calculate this signature for these models; comparing the theoretical expectation of the gravitational wave amplitude to the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors.