Speaker
Description
Recently, there has been a wealth of new experimental proposals to potentially discover gravitational waves with frequencies in the MHz to GHz regime, which would be smoking-gun evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work, we show that existing radio telescope facilities like CHIME and FAST have comparable or better sensitivity to high-frequency gravitational waves than many proposed terrestrial experiments. These telescopes are sensitive to gravitational waves through the Gertsenshtein effect, a Standard-Model process by which gravitational waves convert to electromagnetic radiation in the presence of an external magnetic field. This conversion process would occur in the magnetic field of the Milky Way and solar system, causing the gravitational waves to appear as distinctive radio sources in the sky. Here, we demonstrate that radio telescopes have exceptional potential to discover primordial black hole mergers, the most realistic sources of high-frequency gravitational waves.