Blasi S, Brdar V, Schmitz K. Has NANOGrav Found First Evidence for Cosmic Strings?
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2021;
126:041305. [PMID:
33576657 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.126.041305]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/14/2020] [Accepted: 01/11/2021] [Indexed: 06/12/2023]
Abstract
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves 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.
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