Has NANOGrav found first evidence for cosmic strings?
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics2021-02-01v3General Relativity and Quantum CosmologyHigh Energy Physics - PhenomenologyHigh Energy Physics - Theory
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) 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.
@article{arxiv.2009.06607,
title = {Has NANOGrav found first evidence for cosmic strings?},
author = {Simone Blasi and Vedran Brdar and Kai Schmitz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.06607},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
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