Detecting stochastic gravitational waves with binary resonance

Understand

LIGO and Virgo have initiated the era of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy; but in order to fully explore GW frequency spectrum, we must turn our attention to innovative techniques for GW detection.

• One such approach is to use binary systems as dynamical GW detectors by studying the subtle perturbations to their orbits caused by impinging GWs.
• We present a powerful new formalism for calculating the orbital evolution of a generic binary coupled to a stochastic background of GWs, deriving from first principles a secularly-averaged Fokker-Planck equation which fully characterises the statistical evolution of all six of the binary's orbital elements.
• We also develop practical tools for numerically integrating this equation, and derive the necessary statistical formalism to search for GWs in observational data from binary pulsars and laser-ranging experiments.