Can the gravitational wave background feel wiggles in spacetime?

TL;DR

This paper suggests that small oscillations in the universe's expansion rate could produce distinctive resonance peaks in the gravitational wave background spectrum, potentially revealing primordial origins.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resonance mechanism linking spacetime wiggles to GWB signatures, offering a new way to identify primordial gravitational waves.

Findings

Resonance peaks can appear across all GWB frequencies.

Parameter space for the signal can be constrained by future PTA observations.

Current data shows a hint of a resonance feature near 15 nHz.

Abstract

Recently the international pulsar timing array collaboration has announced the first strong evidence for an isotropic gravitational wave background (GWB). We propose that rapid small oscillations (wiggles) in the Hubble parameter would trigger a resonance with the propagating gravitational waves, leaving novel signature in the GWB spectrum in the form of sharp resonance peaks. The proposed signal can appear at all frequency ranges and is common to continuous spectrum GWBs with arbitrary origin. Due to its resonant nature, the signal strength differs by a perturbation order depending on whether the GWB is primordial or not, which makes it a smoking gun for the primordial origin of the observed GWB. We show that a large part of the parameter space of such signal can be constrained by near future PTA observations, while fitting the signal template to the current NanoGrav 15yr data already hints an interesting feature near 15 nHz.