2025 Project Description

Search for gravitational wave background by fast radio bursts

Supervisors

Kin-Wang Ng
Find out more about supervisors on ASIAA website

Task Description and Goals

It is predicted that there exists a gravitational wave background with a wide frequency spectrum, sourced by various processes such as inflation, cosmological phase transitions, cosmic string-domain wall networks, primordial black hole induced gravitational waves, merging solar-mass and supermassive black hole binaries, and other exotic mechanisms. Observation of this gravitational wave background allows us to probe the early Universe. Recently, a nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background was reported by monitoring the time delays in the arrival times of radio pulses from millisecond pulsars in the pulsar-timing arrays. In this project, we will explore using time delays in fast radio bursts and their correlation over the sky to probe the gravitational wave background and to test gravity theories.

Required Background