Gravitational-wave energy and other fluxes in ghost-free bigravity

ORAL

Abstract

Energy and angular momentum fluxes are key ingredients for making binary waveforms. Identifying the appropriate energy functional is unclear in Hassan-Rosen bigravity, a ghost-free theory with one massive and one massless graviton. The difficulty arises from new degrees of freedom and length scales not present in GR, rendering an Isaacson-style averaging calculation ambiguous. We compute the energy carried by gravitational waves (GWs) in bigravity starting from the action, using the canonical current formalism. The canonical current agrees with other common energy calculations in GR, and is unambiguous (modulo boundary terms). This makes it a good choice for quantifying the GW energy in bigravity or any diff-invariant theory of gravity. Our calculation opens the door for future waveform modeling in bigravity to correctly include backreaction due to emission of gravitational waves.

*Partial support from NSF CAREER Award PHY-2047382, the Ed Owens family foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities

Publication: arXiv:2208.02123, and accepted for publication in PRD.

Presenters

  • Leo C Stein

    • University of Mississippi

Authors

  • Leo C Stein

    • University of Mississippi
  • Alexander M Grant

    • University of Virginia
  • Alexander G Saffer

    • West Virginia University
  • Shammi Tahura

    • University of Guelph
    • University of Guelph, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics