Abstract
In Einstein’s general relativity, gravity is mediated by a massless spin-2 metric field, and its extension to include a mass for the graviton has profound implications for gravitation and cosmology. In 2002, Finn and Sutton [1] used the gravitational-wave (GW) backreaction in binary pulsars, and provided the first bound on the mass of graviton. Here we provide an improved analysis using nine well-timed binary pulsars with a phenomenological treatment. First, individual mass bounds from each pulsar are obtained in the frequentist approach with the help of an ordering principle. The best upper limit on the graviton mass, (90% C.L.), comes from the Hulse-Taylor pulsar PSR . Then, we combine individual pulsars using the Bayesian theorem, and get (90% C.L.) with a uniform prior for . This limit improves the Finn-Sutton limit by a factor of more than 10. Though it is not as tight as those from GWs and the Solar System, it provides an independent and complementary bound from a dynamic regime.
- Received 26 March 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.123015
© 2019 American Physical Society