Binary systems as gravitational wave detectors (note unusual date)

by Diego Blas (KCL)

Tuesday 24 Aug 2021, 16:30 → 18:30 Europe/Zurich

CERN

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 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 currently inaccessible to all other GW experiments.