26–30 Jul 2021
Zoom
Europe/Berlin timezone

Binary systems as dynamical detectors of gravitational waves

26 Jul 2021, 14:55
20m
Zoom

Zoom

Parallel session talk Astroparticle and Gravitational Waves T01: Astroparticle and Gravitational Waves

Speaker

Alex Jenkins (King's College London)

Description

The passage of gravitational waves (GWs) through a binary perturbs the trajectories of the two bodies, potentially causing observable changes to their orbital parameters. In the presence of a stochastic GW background (SGWB) these changes accumulate over time, causing the binary orbit to execute a random walk through parameter space. In this talk I will present a powerful new formalism for calculating the full statistical evolution of a generic binary system in the presence of a SGWB, capturing all six of the binary's orbital parameters. I will show how this formalism can be applied to timing of binary pulsars and lunar laser ranging, thereby setting novel upper limits on the SGWB spectrum in a frequency band that is inaccessible to all other GW experiments.

First author Alex Jenkins
Email alexander.jenkins@kcl.ac.uk
Collaboration / Activity N/A

Primary authors

Alex Jenkins (King's College London) Diego Blas

Presentation materials