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Has NANOGrav Found First Evidence for Cosmic Strings?

Simone Blasi, Vedran Brdar, and Kai Schmitz
Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 041305 – Published 28 January 2021
Physics logo See Research News: Cosmic Ringtones in Pulsar Data?

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 Gμ and loop size α and show that the entire viable parameter space will be probed by an array of future experiments.

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  • 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)

Gravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsParticles & Fields

Research News

Key Image

Cosmic Ringtones in Pulsar Data?

Published 28 January 2021

A pulsar survey has detected a potential signal from low-frequency gravitational waves, which theorists are eager to explain.

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Authors & Affiliations

Simone Blasi1,*, Vedran Brdar1,†, and Kai Schmitz2,‡

  • 1Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
  • 2Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

  • *blasi@mpi-hd.mpg.de
  • vbrdar@mpi-hd.mpg.de
  • kai.schmitz@cern.ch

See Also

Cosmic String Interpretation of NANOGrav Pulsar Timing Data

John Ellis and Marek Lewicki
Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 041304 (2021)

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Vol. 126, Iss. 4 — 29 January 2021

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