Phase decoherence of gravitational wave backgrounds

Abstract

Metric perturbations affect the phase of gravitational waves as they propagate through the inhomogeneous universe. This effect causes Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds (SGWBs) to lose any phase coherence that may have been present at emission or horizon entry. We show that, for a standard cosmological model, this implies complete loss of coherence above frequencies $f\sim 10^{-12}$ Hz. The result is that any attempts to map SGWBs using phase-coherent methods have no foreseeable applications. Incoherent methods that solve directly for the intensity of the SGWBs are the only methods that can reconstruct the angular dependence of any SGWB.

arXiv comment6 pages, 3 figures. v2: typos corrected

References in corpus (36)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Parameter Results
• Efficient Computation of CMB anisotropies in closed FRW models
• Characterization of the LIGO detectors during their sixth science run
• Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves
• Planck 2018 results. VII. Isotropy and Statistics of the CMB
• Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves and eLISA/NGO: Phase Transitions, Cosmic Strings and Other Sources
• The astrophysical gravitational wave stochastic background
• The Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter - LISA Serendipity
• Testing Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter through LISA
• Gravitational wave background from binary systems
• Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background from Coalescing Binary Black Holes
• Mapping gravitational-wave backgrounds using methods from CMB analysis: Application to pulsar timing arrays
• Anisotropy of the astrophysical gravitational wave background: analytic expression of the angular power spectrum and correlation with cosmological observations
• Anisotropies and non-Gaussianity of the Cosmological Gravitational Wave Background
• Instrument, Method, Brightness and Polarization Maps from the 2003 flight of BOOMERanG
• Anisotropies of Gravitational Wave Backgrounds: A Line Of Sight Approach
• Characterizing the Cosmological Gravitational Wave Background Anisotropies and non-Gaussianity
• A radiometer for stochastic gravitational waves
• Gravitational Wave Anisotropies from Primordial Black Holes
• Imprint of the merger and ring-down on the gravitational wave background from black hole binaries coalescence
• A Fast Gridded Method for the Estimation of the Power Spectrum of the CMB from Interferometer Data with Application to the Cosmic Background Imager
• Probing non-Gaussian Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds with LISA
• The signal of the stochastic gravitational wave background and the angular correlation of its energy density
• Gravitational Time Delay Effects on CMB Anisotropies
• A unified view of anisotropies in the astrophysical gravitational wave background
• Mapping Incoherent Gravitational Wave Backgrounds
• Searching for Fossil Fields in the Gravity Sector
• Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect for Gravitational Radiation
• On the Amplitude and Stokes Parameters of a Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background
• Phase-coherent mapping of gravitational-wave backgrounds using ground-based laser interferometers
• Deformation of the gravitational wave spectrum by density perturbations
• Gravitational Wave Background Sky Maps from Advanced LIGO O1 Data
• Probing a stationary non-Gaussian background of stochastic gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
• Searching for Bispectrum of Stochastic Gravitational Waves with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Unsqueezing of standing waves due to inflationary domain structure

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Cosmology with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• New Horizons for Fundamental Physics with LISA
• New universal property of cosmological gravitational wave anisotropies
• Gravitational wave non-linearities and pulsar-timing array angular correlations
• Quantum gravity phenomenology at the dawn of the multi-messenger era -- A review
• Extracting parity-violating gravitational waves from projected tidal force tensor in three dimensions
• Search for the non-linearities of gravitational wave background in NANOGrav 15-year data set
• Antipodal Angular Correlations of Inflationary Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background
• Comparison of maximum likelihood mapping methods for gravitational-wave backgrounds