Searching for Gravitational Waves from Cosmological Phase Transitions with the NANOGrav 12.5-Year Dataset

Creators: Arzoumanian, Zaven; Baker, Paul T.; Blumer, Harsha; Becsy, Bence; Brazier, Adam; Brook, Paul R.; Burke-Spolaor, Sarah; Charisi, Maria; Chatterjee, Shami; Chen, Siyuan; Cordes, James M.; Cornish, Neil J.; Crawford, Fronefield; Cromartie, H. Thankful; DeCesar, Megan E.; Demorest, Paul B.; Dolch, Timothy; Ellis, Justin A.; Ferrara, Elizabeth C.; Fiore, William; Fonseca, Emmanuel; Garver-Daniels, Nathan; Gentile, Peter A.; Good, Deborah C.; Hazboun, Jeffrey S.; Holgado, A. Miguel; Islo, Kristina; Jennings, Ross J.; Jones, Megan L.; Kaiser, Andrew R.; Kaplan, David L.; Kelley, Luke Zoltan; Key, Joey Shapiro; Laal, Nima; Lam, Michael T.; Lazio, T. Joseph W.; Lee, Vincent S. H.; Lorimer, Duncan R.; Luo, Jing; Lynch, Ryan S.; Madison, Dustin R.; McLaughlin, Maura A.; Mingarelli, Chiara M. F.; Mitridate, Andrea; Ng, Cherry; Nice, David J.; Pennucci, Timothy T.; Pol, Nihan S.; Ransom, Scott M.; Ray, Paul S.; Shapiro-Albert, Brent J.; Siemens, Xavier; Simon, Joseph; Spiewak, Renée; Stairs, Ingrid H.; Stinebring, Daniel R.; Stovall, Kevin; Sun, Jerry P.; Swiggum, Joseph K.; Taylor, Stephen R.; Turner, Jacob E.; Vallisneri, Michele; Vigeland, Sarah J.; Witt, Caitlin A.; Zurek, Kathryn M.; NANOGrav Collaboration

Abstract

We search for a first-order phase transition gravitational wave signal in 45 pulsars from the NANOGrav 12.5-year dataset. We find that the data can be modeled in terms of a strong first order phase transition taking place at temperatures below the electroweak scale. However, we do not observe any strong preference for a phase-transition interpretation of the signal over the standard astrophysical interpretation in terms of supermassive black hole mergers; but we expect to gain additional discriminating power with future datasets, improving the signal to noise ratio and extending the sensitivity window to lower frequencies. An interesting open question is how well gravitational wave observatories could separate such signals.

Additional Information

© 2021 American Physical Society. Received 28 April 2021; revised 17 September 2021; accepted 11 November 2021; published 15 December 2021. This work has been carried out by the NANOGrav Collaboration, which is part of the International Pulsar Timing Array. The NANOGrav project receives support from National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center Grant No. 1430284. The Arecibo Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement (No. AST-1744119) by the University of Central Florida (UCF) in alliance with Universidad Ana G. Méndez (UAGM) and Yang Enterprises (YEI), Inc. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. A majority of the computational work was performed on the Caltech High Performance Cluster, partially supported by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This work made use of the Super Computing System (Spruce Knob) at WVU, which is funded in part by the National Science Foundation EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Cooperative Agreement No. 1003907, the state of West Virginia (WVEPSCoR via the Higher Education Policy Commission), and WVU. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Portions of this work performed at N. R. L. were supported by Office of Naval Research 6.1 funding. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. Pulsar research at U. B. C. is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. S. R. T. acknowledges support from NSF Grant No. AST-#2007993, and a Dean's Faculty Fellowship from Vanderbilt University's College of Arts & Science. J. S. and M. V. acknowledge support from the JPL RTD program. S. B. S. acknowledges support for this work from NSF Grants No. 1458952 and No. 1815664. S. B. S. is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program. T. T. P. acknowledges support from the MTA-ELTE Extragalactic Astrophysics Research Group, funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia), that was used during the development of this research. T. D. and M. L. acknowledge NSF AAG Grant No. 2009468. This work is supported in part by NASA under Grant No. 80GSFC17M0002. V. L., A. M., and K. Z. are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0021431 and a Simons Investigator award.

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Published - PhysRevLett.127.251302.pdf

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