English

Can we detect quantum gravity with compact binary inspirals?

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-11-28 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Treating general relativity as an effective field theory, we compute the leading-order quantum corrections to the orbits and gravitational-wave emission of astrophysical compact binaries. These corrections are independent of the (unknown) nature of quantum gravity at high energies, and generate a phase shift and amplitude increase in the observed gravitational-wave signal. Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), these corrections are undetectably small, even in the most optimistic observational scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.06275,
  title  = {Can we detect quantum gravity with compact binary inspirals?},
  author = {Alexander C. Jenkins and Andreas G. A. Pithis and Mairi Sakellariadou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.06275},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, 0 figures; version 2 has additional discussion of our approach and 5 additional references

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:08:54.565Z