Promise of Future Searches for Cosmic Topology.

The shortest distance around the Universe through us is unlikely to be much larger than the horizon diameter if microwave background anomalies are due to cosmic topology. We show that observational constraints from the lack of matched temperature circles in the microwave background leave many possibilities for such topologies. We evaluate the detectability of microwave background multipole correlations for sample cases. Searches for topology signatures in observational data over the large space of possible topologies pose a formidable computational challenge.

Beating the Lyth Bound by Parametric Resonance during Inflation.

We propose a novel mechanism for enhancing primordial gravitational waves without significantly affecting the curvature perturbations produced during inflation. This is achieved due to nonlinear sourcing of resonantly amplified scalar field fluctuations. Our result is an explicit scale-dependent counterexample of the famous Lyth bound, which opens up a promising perspective of producing detectable inflationary tensor modes with low-scale inflation and a sub-Planckian field excursion. We explicitly demonstrate the testability of our mechanism with upcoming cosmic microwave background B-mode observations.