Seminarium "Teoria cząstek elementarnych i kosmologia"

We are currently witnessing the dawn of a new era in astrophysics and cosmology, started by the LIGO/Virgo observations of Gravitational Waves (GW). Thanks to the fact that these signals propagate freely from the moment of their production they also open a new window into processes taking place in the first moments of our Universe. Before we had to rely on photon based signals which could only propagate freely since the Universe became transparent due to recombination when it was about 370k years old. I will discuss prospects for detection of a GW signal from the early Universe with the next generation of experiments. My focus will be sources associated with cosmological phase transitions. I will discuss recent updates on the modelling of these events and their impact on the resulting GW spectra.