Testing Gravity with Realistic Gravitational Waveforms in Pulsar Timing Arrays

Journal Article · Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2024 · Astro-Physcis

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2024/12/054· OSTI ID:2481452

Hu, Wayne ^[1]; Liang, Qiuyue; Lin, Meng-Xiang; Trodden, Mark

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1. university of chicago

We consider the effects of relaxing the assumption that gravitational waves composing the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) are uncorrelated between frequencies in analyses of the data from Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs). While individual monochromatic plane waves are often a good approximation, a background composed of astrophysical sources cannot be monochromatic since an infinite plane wave carries no signal. We consider how relaxing this assumption allows us to extract potential information about modified dispersion relations and other fundamental physics questions, as both the group and phase velocity of waves become relevant. After developing the formalism we carry out simple Gaussian wavepacket examples and then consider more realistic waveforms, such as that from binary inspirals. When the frequency evolves only slowly across the PTA temporal baseline, the monochromatic assumption at an effective mean frequency remains a good approximation and we provide scaling relations that characterize its accuracy.

• Research Organization: University of Chicago
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0009924
• OSTI ID: 2481452
• Journal Information: Astro-Physcis, Journal Name: Astro-Physcis
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English