Testing Gravity with Realistic Gravitational Waveforms in Pulsar Timing Arrays

Kavli Affiliate: Wayne Hu

| First 5 Authors: Wayne Hu, Qiuyue Liang, Meng-Xiang Lin, Mark Trodden,

| Summary:

We consider the effects of relaxing the assumption that gravitational waves
composing the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) are uncorrelated
between frequencies in analyses of the data from Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs).
While individual monochromatic plane waves are often a good approximation, a
background composed of astrophysical sources cannot be monochromatic since an
infinite plane wave carries no signal. We consider how relaxing this assumption
allows us to extract potential information about modified dispersion relations
and other fundamental physics questions, as both the group and phase velocity
of waves become relevant. After developing the formalism we carry out simple
Gaussian wavepacket examples and then consider more realistic waveforms, such
as that from binary inspirals. When the frequency evolves only slowly across
the PTA temporal baseline, the monochromatic assumption at an effective mean
frequency remains a good approximation and we provide scaling relations that
characterize its accuracy.

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