At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate.
Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re familiar with. They’ve long used high-energy particle colliders to test their ideas. By smashing particles together at unfathomable energies, these scientists can discover the building blocks of the building blocks — the high-energy phenomena that happen at short distance scales. Those phenomena also tell us about the earliest moments of the universe when it was tiny, dense and incredibly hot.
But Dunsky learned at the talk that future gravitational wave observatories like the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) could be used to probe high-energy physics. LISA would be capable of detecting hypothetical objects called cosmic strings, vast strands of concentrated energy that might have arisen during the universe’s birth. “I got hooked on trying to understand gravitational wave signals from the early universe,” said Dunsky, who is now a cosmologist and particle physicist at New York University, “and how they could tell us about very, very high-energy physics potentially far beyond what we can currently detect with a collider.”
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