It all started with stretching. In the first fractions of a second, the universe ballooned — physicists call this inflation. Then the rapid expansion gave way to a phase where the field's energy converted into ordinary particles. This transition wasn't smooth but jerky, and the jerk produced ripples in spacetime: a stochastic background of gravitational waves.
These waves are like the echo of a struck bell. They still wander through the cosmos and affect how much "extra" radiation could have existed in the early universe. Astrophysicists measure this via the parameter ΔN_eff — the effective number of neutrino species. If there are too many gravitational waves, they add to ΔN_eff, and observations of the cosmic microwave background and primordial nucleosynthesis set a strict upper limit. From this comes a lower bound on the reheating temperature.
The reheating temperature sets how long the field-dominated phase, called kination, lasted and how far the scalar field managed to roll down. And this field is the very one that today acts as dark energy. Its current equation of state, the parameter w, depends directly on the distance traveled. A model with a single exponential slope gives the right drop but cannot provide acceleration now — the slope is too steep. The solution is a double slope: first a steep descent, then a gentle plateau. Mathematically, this adds a second exponential to the potential, which "switches off" after inflation, leaving an almost flat region for late-time acceleration.
Numerical calculations confirm: in this picture, dark energy today is in a "slow awakening" mode with w around −0.90…−0.95. This is slightly above −1—the value for the cosmological constant. Future sky surveys, such as James Webb and Euclid, will be able to measure w with high precision. Then each such measurement will become an indirect glimpse into the reheating era — a time that would otherwise remain invisible.
So the gravitational echo from the first moments connects to the most mysterious phenomenon of modern cosmology. The ripples born when inflation stopped still dictate how stiffly the universe expands today.
The parameter ΔN_eff was historically used to count neutrino species, but now it also catches gravitational waves, like a microphone that records the trembling of the ground instead of a voice.
In Carl Sagan's novel "Contact," a signal from space contains the blueprint of a machine that uses the rotation of black holes; here, the very fabric of spacetime carries the imprint of conditions that could explain the acceleration of the universe.