Probing the gravitational wave background from cosmic strings with LISA

By P. Auclair, Jose J. Blanco-Pillado, Daniel G. Figueroa, A. Jenkins, Marek Lewicki, M. Sakellariadou, S. Sanidas, L. Sousa, D. Steer, Jeremy M. Wachter and 1 more. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2019

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Cosmic string networks offer one of the best prospects for detection of cosmological gravitational waves (GWs). The combined incoherent GW emission of a large number of string loops leads to a stochastic GW background (SGWB), which encodes the properties of the string network. In this paper we analyze the ability of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) to measure this background, considering leading models of the string networks. We find that LISA will be able to probe cosmic strings with tensions Gμ ≳ 𝒪(10−17), improving by about 6 orders of magnitude current pulsar timing arrays (PTA) constraints, and potentially 3 orders of magnitude with respect to expected constraints from next generation PTA observatories. We include in our analysis possible modifications of the SGWB spectrum due to different hypotheses regarding cosmic history and the underlying physics of the string network. These include possible modifications in the SGWB spectrum due to changes in the number of relativistic degrees of freedom in the early Universe, the presence of a non-standard equation of state before the onset of radiation domination, or changes to the network dynamics due to a string inter-commutation probability less than unity. In the event of a detection, LISA's frequency band is well-positioned to probe such cosmic events. Our results constitute a thorough exploration of the cosmic string science that will be accessible to LISA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ae6dfa2dc617a0543f0a419de523f80baf8f50d

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Citations in the corpus

Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “The parameter q takes the values 4/3, 5/3, or 2 depending on whether the emission is dominated by cusps, kinks or kink-kink collision respectively, see e.g., Vachaspati and Vilenkin (1985); Binetruy et al. (2009); Auclair et al. (2020).”
Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, background): “-standard 4 era can be deduced from the measurement of these turning point frequencies. The observational prospects for measuring the SGWB from cosmic string networks at LISA was recently reviewed in [23]. Besides, the eect of particle production on the loop distribution and thus on the SGWB was rec”
Baryogenesis from the weak scale to the grand unification scale (2020, background): “The spectrum is characterized by the following plateau (Auclair et al., 2020): ΩplateauGW ' 8.04 Ωr ( Gµ Γ )1/2 , (149) where Γ ' 50 parametrizes the cosmic-string decay rate into GWs and Ωr is the energy density in radiation relative to the critical energy density.”
Improved reconstruction of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2020, methodology): “3 We test the model independent reconstruction, using the AET channels, on three well motivated SGWB signals: a simple power law that can mimic an astrophysical GW signal coming from numerous unresolved binary mergers [21, 45] and/or a cosmological signal coming from some inflationary mechanisms [31”
From NANOGrav to LIGO with metastable cosmic strings (2020, background): “in the literature (see [20] for an overview).”