Open this publication in new window or tab >>2023 (English)In: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, E-ISSN 1475-7516, Vol. 2023, no 6, article id 025Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
We study the propagation of cosmological gravitational wave (GW) backgrounds from the early radiation era until the present day in modified theories of gravity. Comparing to general relativity (GR), we study the effects that modified gravity parameters, such as the GW friction αM and the tensor speed excess αT, have on the present-day GW spectrum. We use both the WKB estimate, which provides an analytical description but fails at superhorizon scales, and numerical simulations that allow us to go beyond the WKB approximation. We show that a constant αT makes relatively insignificant changes to the GR solution, especially taking into account the constraints on its value from GW observations by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, while αM can introduce modifications to the spectral slopes of the GW energy spectrum in the low-frequency regime depending on the considered time evolution of αM. The latter effect is additional to the damping or growth occurring equally at all scales that can be predicted by the WKB approximation. In light of the recent observations by pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations, and the potential observations by future detectors such as SKA, LISA, DECIGO, BBO, or ET, we show that, in most of the cases, constraints cannot be placed on the effects of αM and the initial GW energy density Σ*GW separately, but only on the combined effects of the two, unless the signal is observed at different frequency ranges. In particular, we provide some constraints on the combined effects from the reported PTA observations.
Keywords
cosmological phase transitions, Gravitational waves in GR and beyond: theory, modified gravity, physics of the early universe
National Category
Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:su:diva-228064 (URN)10.1088/1475-7516/2023/06/025 (DOI)001025474200006 ()2-s2.0-85163772543 (Scopus ID)
2024-04-092024-04-092024-04-12Bibliographically approved