Stasis Combs: Gravitational-Wave Signatures of Recurrent Cosmological Stasis
Abstract
Cosmological stasis can recur multiple times, and each occurrence imprints a characteristic feature on the inflationary gravitational wave background (IGWB). We extend the single-epoch spectral template to an arbitrary number N of consecutive stasis epochs, deriving a closed-form N-epoch piecewise template that factorizes cleanly: the amplitude steps at each break are determined entirely by the local equation of state ws(i) of that epoch, while the inter-epoch plateau levels encode the accumulated spectral tilt from all prior epochs. Each resolved spectral feature yields an independent test of the Bessel-function consistency relation C2 = C2(α) established in~\cite{BarenboimBurns:paper1}, and the probability that N such tests are simultaneously satisfied by a non-stasis spectrum falls sharply with N, making a confirmed multi-epoch comb the strongest available discriminator against constant-w alternatives. We apply the formalism to the triple-stasis scenario of~\cite{Dienes:2023ziv}, which chains three pairwise stasis mechanisms (matter/radiation, vacuum-energy/matter, vacuum-energy/radiation) sequentially. For each block we derive the conditions under which the epoch lies within the template's validity range ws > −1/3. We show that the Fig.~3 benchmark of~\cite{Dienes:2023ziv} falls outside this range and identify parameter choices that are both physically realizable and accessible to the template. We validate the inter-plateau ratio predictions numerically for representative two- and three-block chains, and work out the touching-epoch limit in which consecutive blocks share a break frequency without an intervening radiation-dominated interval. Finally, we discuss the detectability of a variety of multi-epoch stasis scenarios and give the minimum detectable tensor-to-scalar ratio as a function of the number of recurrent stasis epochs.
Related
- Gravitational Waves as a Probe of Multi-Fluid Cosmologies: General Formalism and the Case of Cosmological Stasis
- Signatures of kinetic gravity braiding in cosmological probes of the gravitational field
- Nonlinear Dynamical Regimes of Cosmological Frequency Combs
- Cosmological stasis and the coupled dark sector of the Dark Dimension
- Evidence for deviation in gravitational light deflection from general relativity at cosmological scales with KiDS-Legacy and CMB lensing
BibTeX
@misc{barenboim2026stasis,
title = {{Stasis Combs: Gravitational-Wave Signatures of Recurrent Cosmological Stasis}},
author = {Gabriela Barenboim and Anne-Katherine Burns},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.20280},
eprint = {2609.20280},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20280},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Stasis Combs: Gravitational-Wave Signatures of Recurrent Cosmological Stasis
AU - Gabriela Barenboim
AU - Anne-Katherine Burns
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.20280
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20280
AB - Cosmological stasis can recur multiple times, and each occurrence imprints a characteristic feature on the inflationary gravitational wave background (IGWB). We extend the single-epoch spectral template to an arbitrary number N of consecutive stasis epochs, deriving a closed-form N-epoch piecewise template that factorizes cleanly: the amplitude steps at each break are determined entirely by the local equation of state w_s^(i) of that epoch, while the inter-epoch plateau levels encode the accumulated spectral tilt from all prior epochs. Each resolved spectral feature yields an independent test of the Bessel-function consistency relation C^2 = C^2(α) established in~\cite{BarenboimBurns:paper1}, and the probability that N such tests are simultaneously satisfied by a non-stasis spectrum falls sharply with N, making a confirmed multi-epoch comb the strongest available discriminator against constant-w alternatives. We apply the formalism to the triple-stasis scenario of~\cite{Dienes:2023ziv}, which chains three pairwise stasis mechanisms (matter/radiation, vacuum-energy/matter, vacuum-energy/radiation) sequentially. For each block we derive the conditions under which the epoch lies within the template's validity range w_s > −1/3. We show that the Fig.~3 benchmark of~\cite{Dienes:2023ziv} falls outside this range and identify parameter choices that are both physically realizable and accessible to the template. We validate the inter-plateau ratio predictions numerically for representative two- and three-block chains, and work out the touching-epoch limit in which consecutive blocks share a break frequency without an intervening radiation-dominated interval. Finally, we discuss the detectability of a variety of multi-epoch stasis scenarios and give the minimum detectable tensor-to-scalar ratio as a function of the number of recurrent stasis epochs.
ER -