- Letter
Adding electromagnetic birefringence to pulsar timing and astrometry to detect gravitational waves
Phys. Rev. D 113, L021307 – Published 29 January, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5wh8-3k22
Abstract
It was recently shown that the time variation of the polarization of electromagnetic waves from pulsars can be used, in cross-correlation with pulsar timing, to probe the chirality of an isotropic gravitational wave background. Here, we show that the expression for the cross-correlation is derived efficiently with the total-angular-momentum formalism and use this framework to extend the formulation to cross-correlation with astrometry. We do so for spin-1 gravitational waves (that may arise in alternative-gravity theories) as well as the general-relativistic spin-2 gravitational waves.
