A physicist has proposed a bold experiment that could allow gravitational waves to be manipulated using laser light. By transferring minute amounts of energy between light and gravity, the interaction would leave behind faint but detectable fingerprints.

We construct a position-space cosmological perturbation theory around spatially flat Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker geometries that allows to model localized primordial sources of gravitational waves. The equations of motion are decoupled using a generalized harmonic gauge, which avoids the use of a scalar-vector-tensor decomposition. We point out that sources cannot generically be defined in a compact domain due to fluctuations of the cosmic perfect fluid. For power law cosmologies, we obtain the exact Green's function necessary to solve for all metric perturbations in terms of a hypergeometric function, which matches with a Green's function derived earlier by Chu. This allows us to derive the closed form expression of the linearized metric perturbation generated by sources up to quadrupolar order in the multipolar expansion.

During inflation gravitational waves are produced in the superhorizon regime, which form stochastic background in the present universe with very wide range of frequencies. Higher frequency gravitational waves never experience superhorizon regime, but they are also amplified after inflation due to the inflaton oscillation. Taking account of the inflaton dynamics after inflation, the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves may extend to much higher frequencies than previously thought. In this paper we calculate the spectrum of high frequency gravitational waves produced during and after inflation in detail, in particular focusing on the connection between the low and high frequency regime, and show that the detailed spectrum can distinguish inflation models.

We investigate gravitational wave emission from periodic timelike orbits of a test particle around a loop quantum gravity-inspired Schwarzschild black hole. The spacetime is characterised by a holonomy-correction parameter that modifies the radial metric component while preserving asymptotic flatness and the classical location of the horizon. The bound geodesics are systematically classified using the zoom--whirl representation labelled by three integers $(z,w,v)$. Gravitational waveforms are computed within a numerical framework that combines exact geodesic motion with the quadrupole approximation, which is suitable for extreme mass ratio inspirals. We demonstrate that the quantum corrections lead to distinct phase shifts, amplitude variations, and modifications to the harmonic structure of the waveforms, with increasingly complex features for orbits with larger zoom numbers. The corresponding frequency spectra and characteristic strain peak, which fall within the millihertz band, are within the sensitivity ranges of space-based detectors such as LISA, Taiji, and TianQin. For specific orbital configurations and values of the quantum-correction parameter, the characteristic strain exceeds the projected detector noise, indicating potential observability. Our results demonstrate that gravitational waves from periodic orbits provide a sensitive probe of quantum-corrected black hole spacetimes in the strong-field regime.