Search

We investigate the potential of the warped-extradimension framework as an explanation for the recently observed stochastic gravitational background at nHz frequencies in pulsar timing arrays (PTA). Our analysis reveals that the PTA data can be effectively accommodated by a first-order phase transition triggered by a radion at the MeV-GeV scale feebly coupled to the Standard Model. Remarkably, this outcome remains robust irrespective of the specific details of the warped extradimension embedding, providing a foundation for future investigations aiming to develop concrete extradimension descriptions of Nature. We also demonstrate that many existing embeddings are not viable, as their radion and graviton phenomenology clash with a MeV-GeV scale radion. As a possible way-out, we sketch a promising solution involving multiple branes, wherein the light radion, graviton, and ensuing light resonances remain consistent with collider bounds and gravity tests., 14 pages, 3 figures

We use the latest constraints on the population of stellar origin binary black holes (SOBBH) from LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK) observations, to estimate the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) they generate in the frequency band of LISA. We account for the faint and distant binaries, which contribute the most to the SGWB, by extending the merger rate at high redshift assuming it tracks the star formation rate. We adopt different methods to compute the SGWB signal: an analytical evaluation, Monte Carlo sums over SOBBH population realisations, and a method that accounts for the role of the detector by simulating LISA data and iteratively removing resolvable signals until only the confusion noise is left, allowing for the extraction of both the expected SGWB and the number of resolvable SOBBHs. Since the latter are few for SNR thresholds larger than five, we confirm that the spectral shape of the SGWB in the LISA band follows the analytical prediction of a power law. We infer the probability distribution of the SGWB amplitude from the LVK GWTC-3 posterior of the binary population model; its interquartile range of $h^2\Omega_\mathrm{GW}(f=3\times10^{-3}\,\mathrm{Hz}) \in [5.65,\,11.5]\times10^{-13}$ is in agreement with most previous estimates. We perform a MC analysis to assess LISA's capability to detect and characterise this signal. Accounting for both the instrumental noise and the galactic binaries foreground, with four years of data, LISA will be able to detect the SOBBH SGWB with percent accuracy, narrowing down the uncertainty on the amplitude by one order of magnitude with respect to the range of possible amplitudes inferred from the population model. A measurement of this signal by LISA will help to break the degeneracy among some of the population parameters, and provide interesting constraints, in particular on the redshift evolution of the SOBBH merger rate., Comment: 39 pages, 15 figures. Prepared for submission to JCAP

et al., The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4-years continuous data stream. Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of ≈0.75 , which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 years. This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime. We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission. We find that the science investigations most affected by mission duration concern the search for seed black holes at cosmic dawn, as well as the study of stellar-origin black holes and of their formation channels via multi-band and multi-messenger observations. We conclude that an extension to 6 years of mission operations is recommended., C.P.L. Berry is supported by the CIERA Board of Visitors Professorship. E. Berti is supported by NSF Grants No. PHY-1912550 and AST-2006538, NASA ATP Grants No. 17-ATP17-0225 and 19-ATP19-0051, NSF-XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003, and NSF Grant PHY-20043. D. Blas acknowledges support from the Fundación Jesus Serra and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias under the Visiting Researcher Programme 2021 agreed between both institutions. T. Bogdanović acknowledges the support by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under award No. 80NSSC19K0319 and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. 1908042. V. Cardoso acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union’s H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “Matter and strong-field gravity: New frontiers in Einstein’s theory” Grant Agreement No. MaGRaTh–646597. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101007855. We thank FCT for financial support through Projects No. UIDB/00099/2020 and through grants PTDC/MAT-APL/30043/2017 and PTDC/FIS-AST/7002/2020. H.-Y. Chen is supported by NASA through NASA Hubble Fellowship Grants No. HST-HF2-51452.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. Z. Haiman acknowledges support by NASA Grant NNX15AB19G and NSF Grants AST-2006176 and AST-1715661. G. Nardini is partly supported by the ROMFORSK Grant Project. No. 302640 “Gravitational Wave Signals From Early Universe Phase Transitions”. P. Pani acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union’s H2020 ERC, Starting Grant Agreement No. DarkGRA–757480. He also acknowledges support under the MIUR PRIN and FARE programmes (GW-NEXT, CUP: B84I20000100001), and by the Amaldi Research Center funded by the MIUR program “Dipartimento di Eccellenza” (CUP: B81I18001170001). A. Sesana acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union’s H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “Binary Massive Black Hole Astrophysics” (B Massive, Grant Agreement: 818691). K. Yagi acknowledges support from NSF Grant PHY-1806776, NASA Grant 80NSSC20K0523, a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and the Owens Family Foundation. D. J. Weir was supported by a Science and Technology Facilities Council Ernest Rutherford Fellowship, Grant no. ST/R003904/1, and by the Academy of Finland, Grants 324882 and 328958. A. Zimmerman is supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1912578. The authors would like to acknowledge networking support by the GWverse COST Action CA16104, “Black holes, gravitational waves and fundamental physics.” The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. This research has made use of data, software and web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (www.gw-openscience.org/), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO are funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Spain.