English

Bounding the graviton mass with binary pulsar observations

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2009-11-07 v1

Abstract

By comparing the observed orbital decay of the binary pulsars PSRB1913+16 and PSRB1534+12 to that predicted by general relativity due to gravitational-wave emission, we are able to bound the mass of the graviton to be less than 7.6×1020eV/c27.6\times10^{-20} \text{eV}/c^2 at 90% confidence. This is the first such bound to be derived from dynamic gravitational fields. It is approximately two orders of magnitude weaker than the static-field bound from solar system observations, and will improve with further observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0112018,
  title  = {Bounding the graviton mass with binary pulsar observations},
  author = {Patrick J. Sutton and Lee Samuel Finn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0112018},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

9 pages, 1 figure. Presented at Fourth Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves, Perth, 2001

R2 v1 2026-07-22T12:34:53.776Z