Gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation: A revolutionary discovery

About a month ago the BICEP2 experiment located at the South Pole discovered a potentially revolutionary discovery It measured for the first time correlations on large angular scales of a specific polarization pattern in the cosmic microwave background CMB radiation In the lecture I will review the measurement and explain its interpretation A possible perhaps likely origin of the polarization in the CMB is that it was produced by quantum fluctuations of spacetime during a period of cosmic inflation These tensor fluctuations are imprinted on the CM