2020/02/29 by Yi-Fan Wang, Rui Niu, Tao Zhu +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gravitation #Gravitational energy #Gravitational wave #Gravitational-wave observatory #LIGO #Parity (physics) #Pulsar #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abd7a6
published as 2021 ApJ 908 58 · Accepted version for the Astrophysical Journal, posterior files and plots in https://github.com/yi-fan-wang/ParitywithGW and https://yi-fan-wang.github.io/ParitywithGW/
openalex created_date 2020/02/24 · openalex publication_date 2021/02/01 · arxiv created 2021/02/05 · arxiv updated 2021/02/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract Einstein's general relativity, as the most successful theory of gravity, is one of the cornerstones of modern physics. However, the experimental tests for gravity in the high energy region are limited. The emerging gravitational-wave astronomy has opened an avenue for probing the fundamental properties of gravity in a strong and dynamical field, and in particular, a high energy regime. In this work, we test the parity conservation of gravity with gravitational waves. If the parity symmetry is broken, the left- and right-handed modes of gravitational waves would follow different equations of motion, dubbed as birefringence. We perform full Bayesian inference by comparing the state-of-the-art waveform with parity violation with the compact binary coalescence data released by LIGO and Virgo collaboration. We do not find any violations of general relativity, thus constrain the lower bound of the parity-violating energy scale to be 0.09 GeV through the velocity birefringence of gravitational waves. This provides the most stringent experimental test of gravitational parity symmetry to date. We also find third generation gravitational-wave detectors can enhance this bound to GeV if there is still no violation, comparable to the current energy scale in particle physics, which indicates gravitational-wave astronomy can usher in a new era of testing the ultraviolet behavior of gravity in the high energy region.