Search for the primordial gravitational waves with Very Long Baseline Interferometry

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential detection of primordial gravitational waves through systematic proper motions of distant radio sources, using VLBI data to identify quadrupole patterns indicative of early Universe phenomena.

Contribution

It presents an analysis of decades-long VLBI data to search for quadrupole patterns in quasar proper motions as signatures of primordial gravitational waves.

Findings

No significant quadrupole pattern detected.

Constraints placed on the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves.

Analysis varies across different redshift zones.

Abstract

Some models of the expanding Universe predict that the astrometric proper motion of distant radio sources embedded in space-time are non-zero as the radial distance from observer to the source grows. Systematic proper motion effects would produce a predictable quadrupole pattern on the sky that could be detected using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) technique. This quadrupole pattern can be interpreted either as an anisotropic Hubble expansion, or as a signature of the primordial gravitational waves in the early Universe. We present our analysis of a large set of geodetic VLBI data spanning 1979--2015 to estimate the dipole and quadrupole harmonics in the expansion of the vector field of the proper motions of quasars in the sky. The analysis is repeated for different redshift zones.