Circumstances are described in which symmetry breaking, during the formation of our three-dimensional brane within a higher-dimensional space in the early universe, excites mesoscopic classical radion or brane-displacement degrees of freedom and produces a detectable stochastic background of gravitational radiation. The spectrum of the background is related to both the unification energy scale and the sizes and numbers of large extra dimensions. It is shown that properties of the background observable by gravitational-wave observatories at frequencies $f\approx {10}^{-4}\mathrm{Hz}$ to ${10}^3\mathrm{Hz}$ contain information about unification on energy scales from $1$ to ${10}^{10}\mathrm{TeV},$ gravity propagating through extra-dimension sizes from 1 mm to ${10}^{-18}\mathrm{mm},$ and the dynamical history and stabilization of from one to seven extra dimensions.

• Received 8 September 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.62.121302