Quadrupolar gravitational radiation as a test-bed for f(R)-gravity

TL;DR

This paper develops a quadrupolar gravitational radiation model for f(R)-gravity and demonstrates that current binary pulsar observations are compatible with certain f(R) models, suggesting gravitational waves could test these theories.

Contribution

It introduces a quadrupolar approach to gravitational radiation in f(R)-gravity and assesses its compatibility with pulsar data, providing a new testing framework.

Findings

f(R)-gravity models are compatible with pulsar observations

gravitational radiation can serve as a test-bed for f(R)-gravity

strong field regime observations do not rule out f(R)-gravity

Abstract

The debate concerning the viability of f(R)-gravity as a natural extension of General Relativity could be realistically addressed by using results coming from binary pulsars like PSR 1913+16. To this end, we develop a quadrupolar approach to the gravitational radiation for a class of ana- lytic f(R)-models. We show that experimental results are compatible with a consistent range of f(R)-models. This means that f(R)-gravity is not ruled out by the observations and gravitational radiation (in strong field regime) could be a test-bed for such theories.