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Potential of Radio Telescopes as High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Detectors

Valerie Domcke1,2,3,* and Camilo Garcia-Cely1,†

  • 1Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Notkestrasse 85, 22607 Hamburg, Germany
  • 2Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1 Esplanade des Particules, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
  • 3Institute of Physics, Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

  • *valerie.domcke@cern.ch
  • †camilo.garcia.cely@desy.de
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 021104 – Published 14 January, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.021104

Abstract

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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Outline

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 021104– Published 14 January, 2021
  • Received 11 June 2020
  • Revised 6 August 2020
  • Accepted 7 December 2020
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