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Potential of radio telescopes as high-frequency gravitational wave detectors
In the presence of magnetic fields, gravitational waves are converted into photons and vice versa. We demonstrate that this conversion leads to a distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which can serve as a detector for MHz to GHz gravitational wave sources active before reionization. T...
Autores principales: | , |
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Lenguaje: | eng |
Publicado: |
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.021104 http://cds.cern.ch/record/2722384 |
Sumario: | In the presence of magnetic fields, gravitational waves are converted into photons and vice versa. We demonstrate that this conversion leads to a distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which can serve as a detector for MHz to GHz gravitational wave sources active before reionization. The measurements of the radio telescope EDGES can be cast as a bound on the gravitational wave amplitude, hc<10-21(10-12) at 78 MHz, for the strongest (weakest) cosmic magnetic fields allowed by current astrophysical and cosmological constraints. Similarly, the results of ARCADE 2 imply hc<10-24(10-14) at 3–30 GHz. For the strongest magnetic fields, these constraints exceed current laboratory constraints by about 7 orders of magnitude. Future advances in 21 cm astronomy may conceivably push these bounds below the sensitivity of cosmological constraints on the total energy density of gravitational waves. |
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