Has NANOGrav found first evidence for cosmic strings?

Sep 14, 2020
7 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.Lett. 126 (2021) 4, 041305
  • Published: Jan 29, 2021
e-Print:
Report number:
  • CERN-TH-2020-151

Citations per year

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Abstract: (APS)
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.
Note:
  • 7 pages, 3 figures. v2: revised treatment of the higher cosmic-string modes [see Eq. (6)], resulting in a few numerical but no qualitative changes. v3: matches version published in PRL
  • Gravitation and Astrophysics
  • gravitational radiation: stochastic
  • gravitational radiation: background
  • cosmic string: network
  • gravitational radiation
  • observatory
  • parameter space
  • cosmic string: string tension
  • pulsar
  • gravitational radiation: emission
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