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Searching for Gravitational Waves from Cosmological Phase Transitions with the NANOGrav 12.5-Year Dataset
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Searching for Gravitational Waves from Cosmological Phase Transitions with the NANOGrav 12.5-Year Dataset

Zaven Arzoumanian, Paul T Baker, Harsha Blumer, Bence Becsy, Adam Brazier, Paul R Brook, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, Maria Charisi, Shami Chatterjee, Siyuan Chen, …
Physical review letters, Vol.127(25), pp.251302-251302
15/12/2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.251302
PMID: 35029450

Abstract

Physical Sciences Physics Physics, Multidisciplinary Science & Technology
We search for a first-order phase transition gravitational wave signal in 45 pulsars from the NANOGrav 12.5-year dataset. We find that the data can be modeled in terms of a strong first order phase transition taking place at temperatures below the electroweak scale. However, we do not observe any strong preference for a phase-transition interpretation of the signal over the standard astrophysical interpretation in terms of supermassive black hole mergers; but we expect to gain additional discriminating power with future datasets, improving the signal to noise ratio and extending the sensitivity window to lower frequencies. An interesting open question is how well gravitational wave observatories could separate such signals.
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https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.251302View
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