Gravitational wave stochastic background from cosmological particle decay

Abstract

We assume that the cosmological dark matter is composed of massive neutral scalar particles that decay into two massless particles. The decay produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs) via a 'memory effect' mechanism. We calculate the spectral amplitude and slope of the resulting background, which is frequency independent (flat). We discuss its potential observability and show that the resulting background might dominate the cosmological GW background at frequencies above about 10 GHz. Penrose has proposed a cosmological model in which dark matter particles have the Planck mass and decay into two gravitons. For these, the spectrum has an additional 'direct' contribution from the decay products, which we also calculate. At low frequencies, this direct contribution also has a flat spectrum but with a much smaller amplitude than the memory part.

arXiv commentFinal published version (Open Access)

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Stochastic gravitational wave background due to gravitational wave memory
• Nonlinear gravitational-wave memory from cusps and kinks on cosmic strings
• Memory of a Random Walk: Astrometric deflections from gravitational wave memory accumulation over cosmological scales