On March 17, 2014, a team of astrophysicists announced the physics of what happened in the first one trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang. The American team — also known as BICEP2 — announced these findings of what the science community calls the detection of primordial gravitational waves.

In this lecture, Dr. Ali Nayeri introduces an alternative model to what is proposed by inflation models about gravitational waves. Using string theory cosmology, Dr. Nayeri will show the discrepancies in the data and predictions within the inflation model. String gas cosmology, which is based on application of thermodynamics of closed strings in the very early universe, however, offers an alternative component to these inflationary models now “proven” by astrophysicists with the BICEP2 project.

Eight years ago, Chapman University’s Dr. Ali Nayeri, along with fellow theoretical physicists, predicted the same feature of gravitational waves from the early universe in the framework of string theory. He predicted that the spectral index of tensor modes (gravitational waves) power spectrum from the early universe should be tilted blue which inflationary models predicted otherwise (zero or with red tilt).

Ali Nayeri, Ph.D., is a member of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University, and a faculty member in the university’s Schmid College of Science and Technology. His fields of research include string and brane cosmology, early universe and inflation general relativity, statistical physics of semi-classical theory of quantum gravity, and alternative cosmologies.