The decay produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW) via a new "memory effect" mechanism. Expand abstract.

We assume that the cosmological dark matter is composed of massive neutral scalar particles that decay into two massless particles. The decay produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW) via a new "memory effect" mechanism. We calculate the spectral amplitude and slope of the resulting background, which is frequency-independent (flat). We discuss its potential observability and show that the resulting background might dominate the cosmological GW background at frequencies above about 10 GHz. Penrose has proposed a cosmological model in which dark matter particles have the Planck mass and decay into two gravitons [arXiv:1707.04169]. For these, the spectrum has an additional "direct" contribution from the decay products, which we also calculate. At low frequencies, this direct contribution also has a flat spectrum but with a much smaller amplitude than the memory part.

We present the second Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (2-OGC) of compact-binary coalescences, obtained from the complete set of public data from Advanced LIGO's first and second observing runs. Expand abstract.

We present the second Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (2-OGC) of compact-binary coalescences, obtained from the complete set of public data from Advanced LIGO's first and second observing runs. For the first time we also search public data from the Virgo observatory. The sensitivity of our search benefits from updated methods of ranking candidate events including the effects of non-stationary detector noise and varying network sensitivity; in a separate targeted binary black hole merger search we also impose a prior distribution of binary component masses. We identify a population of 14 binary black hole merger events with probability of astrophysical origin $> 0.5$ as well as the binary neutron star merger GW170817. We confirm the previously reported events GW170121, GW170304, and GW170727 and also report GW151205, a new marginal binary black hole merger with a primary mass of $67^{+28}_{-17}\,\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ that may have formed through hierarchical merger. We find no additional significant binary neutron star merger or neutron star--black hole merger events. To enable deeper follow-up as our understanding of the underlying populations evolves, we make available our comprehensive catalog of events, including the sub-threshold population of candidates and posterior samples from parameter inference of the 30 most significant binary black hole candidates.

Mirror particles do not interact with an ordinary observer except gravitationally, which is the reason why no electromagnetic signals accompanying gravitational waves from mergers with components composed of mirror matter are expected. Expand abstract.

We suggest that a major fraction of binary neutron star and black hole - neutron star mergers, which might provide gravitational wave signal detectable by LIGO/VIRGO, emerged from the hidden mirror sector. Mirror particles do not interact with an ordinary observer except gravitationally, which is the reason why no electromagnetic signals accompanying gravitational waves from mergers with components composed of mirror matter are expected. Therefore, if the dark matter budget of the universe is mostly contributed by the mirror particles, we predict that only about one binary neutron star (neutron star - black hole) merger out of ten detectable by LIGO/VIRGO could be accompanied by a gamma ray burst. It seems the list of candidate events recorded by LIGO/VIRGO during third observational run supports our predictions.

This is inspired by descriptions of plane gravitational waves in string theory. Expand abstract.

We define one-parameter "massive" deformations of Maass forms and Jacobi forms. This is inspired by descriptions of plane gravitational waves in string theory. Examples include massive Green's functions (that we write in terms of Kronecker-Eisenstein series) and massive modular graph functions.

Cosmological CPT violation will rotate the polarized direction of CMB photons, convert partial CMB E mode into B mode and vice versa. Expand abstract.

Cosmological CPT violation will rotate the polarized direction of CMB photons, convert partial CMB E mode into B mode and vice versa. It will generate non-zero EB, TB spectra and change the EE, BB, TE spectra. This phenomenon gives us a way to detect the CPT-violation signature from CMB observations, and also provides a new mechanism to produce B mode polarization. In this paper, we perform a global analysis on tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and polarization rotation angles based on current CMB datasets with both low $\ell$ (Planck, BICEP2/Keck Array) and high $\ell$ (POLARBEAR, SPTpol, ACTPol). Benefited from the high precision of CMB data, we obtain the isotropic rotation angle $\bar{\alpha} = -0.01^\circ \pm 0.37^\circ $ at 68% C.L., the variance of the anisotropic rotation angles $C^{\alpha}(0)

We study spin and flavor oscillations of neutrinos under the influence of gravitational waves (GWs). Expand abstract.

We study spin and flavor oscillations of neutrinos under the influence of gravitational waves (GWs). We rederive the quasiclassical equation for the evolution of the neutrino spin in various external fields in curved spacetime starting from the Dirac equation for a massive neutrino. Then, we consider neutrino spin oscillations in nonmoving and unpolarized matter, a transverse magnetic field, and a plane GW. We show that a parametric resonance can take place in this system. We also study neutrino flavor oscillations in GWs. The equation for the density matrix of flavor neutrinos is solved when we discuss the neutrino interaction with stochastic GWs emitted by coalescing supermassive black holes. We find the fluxes of cosmic neutrinos, undergoing flavor oscillations in such a gravitational background, which can be potentially measured by a terrestrial detector. Some astrophysical applications of our results are considered.

While the expectation is that the majority of gravitational wave events observable by ground-based detectors will be emitted by compact binaries in quasi-circular orbits, the growing number of detections suggests the possibility of detecting waves from binaries with non-negligible orbital eccentricity in the near future. Expand abstract.

While the expectation is that the majority of gravitational wave events observable by ground-based detectors will be emitted by compact binaries in quasi-circular orbits, the growing number of detections suggests the possibility of detecting waves from binaries with non-negligible orbital eccentricity in the near future. Several gravitational wave models incorporate the effects of small orbital eccentricities ($e \lesssim 0.2$), but these models may not be sufficient to analyze waves from systems with moderate eccentricity. We recently developed a gravitational wave model that faithfully accounts for eccentric corrections in the moderate eccentricity regime ($e \lesssim 0.8$ for certain source masses) at 3rd post-Newtonian order. Here we consider the data analysis implications of this particular waveform model by producing and analyzing posteriors via Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. We find that the accuracy to which eccentricity and source masses can be measured can increase by 2 orders of magnitude with increasing eccentricity of the signal. We also find that signals with low eccentricity can be confidently identified as eccentric as soon as their eccentricity exceeds 0.008 (0.05) for low (high) mass systems, suggesting eccentric detections are likely to come first from low-mass systems. We complete our analysis by investigating the systematic (mismodeling) error inherent in our post-Newtonian model, finding that for signals with a signal-to-noise ratio of 15, the systematic error is below the statistical error for eccentricities as high as 0.8 (0.5) for low (high) mass systems. We also investigate the systematic error that arises from using a model that neglects eccentricity when the signal is truly eccentric, finding that the systematic error exceeds the statistical error in mass for eccentricities as small as 0.02.

We implement adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations of global topological strings using the public numerical relativity code, GRChombo. Expand abstract.

We implement adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations of global topological strings using the public numerical relativity code, GRChombo. We perform a quantitative investigation of the dynamics of single sinusoidally displaced string configurations, studying a wide range of string energy densities $\mu \propto \ln{\lambda}$, defined by the string width parameter $\lambda$ over two orders of magnitude. We investigate the resulting massless (Goldstone boson or axion) radiation and massive (Higgs) radiation signals, using quantitative diagnostic tools and geometries to determine the eigenmode decomposition of these radiation components. Given analytic radiation predictions, we compare the oscillating string trajectory with a backreaction model accounting for radiation energy losses, finding excellent agreement: we establish that backreaction decay is accurately characterised by the inverse square of the amplitude being proportional to the inverse tension $\mu$ for $3\lesssim \lambda \lesssim 100$. We conclude that analytic radiation modelling in the thin-string (Nambu-Goto) limit provides the appropriate cosmological limit for global strings. We also make a preliminary study of massive radiation modes, including the large $\lambda$ regime in which they become strongly suppressed relative to the preferred massless channel. We comment on the implications of this study for predictions of axions and gravitational waves produced by cosmic string networks.

In the high frequency approximation the four independent Weyl tensor harmonics evolve as gravitational waves on the anisotropic background in the same manner as in the case without vorticity, whereas vorticity gives a first order disturbance of sonic waves. Expand abstract.

First order perturbations of homogeneous and hypersurface orthogonal LRS (Locally Rotationally Symmetric) class II cosmologies with a cosmological constant are considered in the framework of the 1+1+2 covariant decomposition of spacetime. The perturbations, which are of perfect fluid type, include general scalar, vector and tensor modes and extend some previous works where vorticity perturbations were excluded. A harmonic decomposition is performed and the field equations are then reduced to a set of eight evolution equations for eight harmonic coefficients, representing perturbations in density, shear, vorticity and the Weyl tensor, in terms of which all other variables can be expressed algebraically. This system decouples into two sub-systems, one for five and one for three coefficients. As previously known, vorticity perturbations cannot be generated to any order in a barytopic perfect fluid. Hence the time development of existing first order vorticity perturbations are seen to be completely determined by the background. However, an already existing vorticity will act as source terms in the evolution equations for the other quantities. In the high frequency approximation the four independent Weyl tensor harmonics evolve as gravitational waves on the anisotropic background in the same manner as in the case without vorticity, whereas vorticity gives a first order disturbance of sonic waves.

Modern ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors require a complex interferometer configuration with multiple coupled optical cavities. Expand abstract.

Modern ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors require a complex interferometer configuration with multiple coupled optical cavities. Since achieving the resonances of the arm cavities is the most challenging among the lock acquisition processes, the scheme called arm length stabilization (ALS) had been employed for lock acquisition of the arm cavities. We designed a new type of the ALS, which is compatible with the interferometers having long arms like the next generation GW detectors. The features of the new ALS are that the control configuration is simpler than those of previous ones and that it is not necessary to lay optical fibers for the ALS along the kilometer-long arms of the detector. Along with simulations of its noise performance, an experimental test of the new ALS was performed utilizing a single arm cavity of KAGRA. This paper presents the first results of the test where we demonstrated that lock acquisition of the arm cavity was achieved using the new ALS and residual noise was measured to be $8.2\,\mathrm{Hz}$ in units of frequency, which is smaller than the linewidth of the arm cavity and thus low enough to lock the full interferometer of KAGRA in a repeatable and reliable manner.