Measuring cosmic expansion with diffractive gravitational scintillation of nanoHertz gravitational waves

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jow, Dylan L., Pen, Ue-Li
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866913416046706688
author Jow, Dylan L.
Pen, Ue-Li
author_facet Jow, Dylan L.
Pen, Ue-Li
contents The recent discovery of ultra-long wavelength gravitational waves through the advent of pulsar timing arrays (PTA) has opened up new avenues for fundamental science. Here we show that every PTA source will be diffractively lensed by potentially hundreds of galactic disks transverse to its line of sight, leading to modest modulations in the strain, $Δh / h \sim 10^{-3} λ^{-1}_{1 \rm pc.}$, due to wave lensing effects. The induced interference, or scintillation, pattern will be resolvable by coherent PTAs and may be leveraged, alongside fore-ground redshift information, to make precise measurements of cosmic expansion. If future PTA experiments can achieve enough signal-to-noise to detect these small modulations, hundreds of redshift-distance pairs may be inferred from the diffractive lensing of an individual PTA source.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03214
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring cosmic expansion with diffractive gravitational scintillation of nanoHertz gravitational waves
Jow, Dylan L.
Pen, Ue-Li
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
The recent discovery of ultra-long wavelength gravitational waves through the advent of pulsar timing arrays (PTA) has opened up new avenues for fundamental science. Here we show that every PTA source will be diffractively lensed by potentially hundreds of galactic disks transverse to its line of sight, leading to modest modulations in the strain, $Δh / h \sim 10^{-3} λ^{-1}_{1 \rm pc.}$, due to wave lensing effects. The induced interference, or scintillation, pattern will be resolvable by coherent PTAs and may be leveraged, alongside fore-ground redshift information, to make precise measurements of cosmic expansion. If future PTA experiments can achieve enough signal-to-noise to detect these small modulations, hundreds of redshift-distance pairs may be inferred from the diffractive lensing of an individual PTA source.
title Measuring cosmic expansion with diffractive gravitational scintillation of nanoHertz gravitational waves
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03214