Abstract
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves has recently reported strong evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process affecting the pulsar timing residuals in its 12.5-year data set. We demonstrate that this process admits an interpretation in terms of a stochastic gravitational-wave background emitted by a cosmic-string network in the early Universe. We study stable Nambu-Goto strings in dependence of their tension and loop size and show that the entire viable parameter space will be probed by an array of future experiments.
- Received 14 October 2020
- Accepted 11 January 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.041305
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
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