Stasis Combs: Gravitational-Wave Signatures of Recurrent Cosmological Stasis

arXiv:2609.20280 · hep-ph, astro-ph.CO, gr-qc · Submitted 2026-07-29 · Read on arXiv

hep-ph, astro-ph.CO, gr-qc

Submitted: 2026-07-29

Updated: 2026-07-29

Comments: 24 pages, 6 figures

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Cosmological stasis can recur multiple times, and each occurrence imprints a characteristic feature on the inflationary gravitational wave background (IGWB).

Terminology

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 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 squared = C 2(α) established in, 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, 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 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.

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