4–5 Jun 2026
University of Geneva
Europe/Zurich timezone

A Fast Method to Compute Scalar Induced Gravitational Waves on a Lattice

5 Jun 2026, 10:15
15m
Sciences II Auditorium A100 (University of Geneva)

Sciences II Auditorium A100

University of Geneva

Quai Ernest-Ansermet 30

Speaker

Giovanni Piccoli (University of Zurich)

Description

Scalar Induced Gravitational Waves (SIGW) are generated at second order in perturbation theory and to achieve observational relevance, inflationary dynamics must evade the standard slow-roll scenario at small scales, generating large curvature perturbations following strongly non-gaussian statistics. We propose a method to efficiently compute the SIGW spectrum including arbitrary non-gaussianities. First, we solve the wave equation adopting semi-analytic methods; this result into an expression involving integrals in Fourier space impossible to solve directly on a lattice, a bottleneck that we overcome by recasting these integrals
as a sum of $N_\alpha \sim 50$ convolutions, each of which can be computed efficiently with FFT methods. Finally, the power spectrum is measured directly from the lattice realization. We implement this in FLAN-SIGW, a GPU-accelerated code able to compute fully non-perturbative, non-Gaussian SIGW spectra in seconds with an error within $\sim 10\%$ with modest computational resources. In this first implementation, in order to assess the performance of the method, we adopt a standard radiation-dominated background with $w = 1/3$.

Author

Giovanni Piccoli (University of Zurich)

Presentation materials