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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Domcke, Valerie, Garcia-Cely, Camilo
Lenguaje:eng
Publicado: 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.021104
http://cds.cern.ch/record/2722384
Descripción
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.