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  • Letter

Evidence for different gravitational-wave sources in the NANOGrav dataset

Ligong Bian1,*, Rong-Gen Cai2,3,4,†, Jing Liu4,3,‡, Xing-Yu Yang2,3,§, and Ruiyu Zhou1,∥

  • 1Department of Physics, Chongqing University, Chongqing 401331, China
  • 2CAS Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 2735, Beijing 100190, China
  • 3School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.19A Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, China
  • 4School of Fundamental Physics and Mathematical Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou 310024, China

  • *lgbycl@cqu.edu.cn
  • †cairg@itp.ac.cn
  • ‡liujing@ucas.ac.cn
  • §yangxingyu@itp.ac.cn
  • ∥zhoury@cqu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 103, L081301 – Published 12 April, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.L081301

Abstract

The NANOGrav Collaboration recently reported a strong evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process in the pulsar-timing data. We evaluate the evidence of interpreting this process as mergers of super massive black hole binaries and/or various stochastic gravitational-wave background sources in the early Universe, including first-order phase transitions, cosmic strings, domain walls, and large amplitude curvature perturbations. We discuss the implications of the constraints on these possible sources. It is found that the data shows a positive evidence in favor of the cosmic strings against other gravitational-wave sources based on the Bayes factor analysis.

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Phys. Rev. D 103, L081301– Published 12 April, 2021
  • Received 12 October 2020
  • Accepted 12 March 2021
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