Constraining Cosmological Phase Transitions with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array.

A cosmological first-order phase transition is expected to produce a stochastic gravitational wave background. If the phase transition temperature is on the MeV scale, the power spectrum of the induced stochastic gravitational waves peaks around nanohertz frequencies, and can thus be probed with high-precision pulsar timing observations. We search for such a stochastic gravitational wave background with the latest data set of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. We find no evidence for a Hellings-Downs spatial correlation as expected for a stochastic gravitational wave background. Therefore, we present constraints on first-order phase transition model parameters. Our analysis shows that pulsar timing is particularly sensitive to the low-temperature (T∼1-100 MeV) phase transition with a duration (ß/H_{*})^{-1}∼10^{-2}-10^{-1} and therefore can be used to constrain the dark and QCD phase transitions.

Detectability of Gravitational Waves from High-Redshift Binaries.

Recent nondetection of gravitational-wave backgrounds from pulsar timing arrays casts further uncertainty on the evolution of supermassive black hole binaries. We study the capabilities of current gravitational-wave observatories to detect individual binaries and demonstrate that, contrary to conventional wisdom, some are, in principle, detectable throughout the Universe. In particular, a binary with rest-frame mass ≳10^{10}M_{⊙} can be detected by current timing arrays at arbitrarily high redshifts. The same claim will apply for less massive binaries with more sensitive future arrays. As a consequence, future searches for nanohertz gravitational waves could be expanded to target evolving high-redshift binaries. We calculate the maximum distance at which binaries can be observed with pulsar timing arrays and other detectors, properly accounting for redshift and using realistic binary waveforms.