Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies

By N. Aggarwal, O. Aguiar, A. Bauswein, G. Cella, S. Clesse, A. Cruise, V. Domcke, Daniel G. Figueroa, A. Geraci, Maxim Goryachev and 15 more. Living Reviews in Relativity, 2020

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first direct measurement of gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations has opened up new avenues to explore our Universe. This white paper outlines the challenges and gains expected in gravitational-wave searches at frequencies above the LIGO/Virgo band, with a particular focus on Ultra High-Frequency Gravitational Waves (UHF-GWs), covering the MHz to GHz range. The absence of known astrophysical sources in this frequency range provides a unique opportunity to discover physics beyond the Standard Model operating both in the early and late Universe, and we highlight some of the most promising gravitational sources. We review several detector concepts that have been proposed to take up this challenge, and compare their expected sensitivity with the signal strength predicted in various models. This report is the summary of the workshop “Challenges and opportunities of high-frequency gravitational wave detection” held at ICTP Trieste, Italy in October 2019, that set up the stage for the recently launched Ultra-High-Frequency Gravitational Wave (UHF-GW) initiative.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/843cb292ccf9977bd7568dcde67f809875afc72c