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arXiv · 2603.13924

Smoking-gun signatures of bounce cosmology from echoes of relic gravitational waves

Mian Zhu·Yi-Fu Cai
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Abstract

We report a novel feature of relic gravitational waves (GWs) in non-singular bounce cosmologies that is testable in light of GWs astronomy. In non-singular bounce cosmologies, the effective potential $M_p^2 a^{\prime \prime}/a$ that governs the evolution of primordial GWs contains two peaks due to the existence of contraction phase prior to the standard expansion phase. Accordingly, relic GWs interference between the two peaks in the effective potential. This interference results in a distinctive oscillatory feature in the energy density spectrum of GWs, analog to the resonant tunneling effect in quantum mechanics. As a result, the GWs spectrum exhibits an oscillatory patterns on high frequency regime, distinctive to other cosmological scenarios such as inflation. We show that the amplitude of GWs spectrum is high enough to reach the sensitivity of current and forthcoming GWs instruments, making our predictions falsifiable. Hence, our finding offers a promising way to experimentally test the non-singular bounce scenarios and search for new physics in early universe cosmologies.

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Mian Zhu, Yi-Fu Cai. 2026-03-14. Smoking-gun signatures of bounce cosmology from echoes of relic gravitational waves. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213%2Fae6f10

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