Primordial gravitational waves, The Inflation and The Big Bang

The detection of gravitational waves by a team of scientists involved in the BICEP 2 collaboration is a prodigious discovery similar in importance and scale to the discovery of Higgs field and it has consequences for cosmology and our perception of the universe. The discovery has confirmed the last untested prediction of Einstein's Relativity.

The BICEP 2 collaboration, the theoretical physicist Alan Guth, who proposed the Inflationary cosmology in 1980, the Russian American physicist Andrei Linde, who is the father of the Theory of Inflation and Eternal Inflation,  may be crowned with Nobel Prize.

The Inflation offers an explanation for some very important problems in cosmology. Inflation makes one prediction, the existence of a primordial gravitational wave background with particular properties.  Such gravitational waves would leave a characteristic signature in the CMB maps, namely a slight circular polarization waves.

For detecting the circular polarization wave or the called the B mode signal, BICEP 2 was able to measure features that are 1/100000000 of the CMB signal, which is itself 1/100000000 of the ambient thermal radiation.  The BICEP 2 has got to be one of the most precise measurements in the history of science.

The existence of the CMB was a prediction of the Big Bang Theory and its detection provided the best evidence for the Big Bang, the BICEP 2 is the evidence that convinces us that Inflation really happened.