Gravitational Wave Cosmology and Modified Gravity
Summary
Gravitational wave cosmology exploits the ripples in spacetime emitted by compact binaries as “standard sirens” to map the expansion history of the Universe and to probe the fundamental nature of gravity. In parallel, modified gravity theories have been developed to address the origin of cosmic acceleration without invoking a cosmological constant or unknown dark energy component. These theories generically predict alterations to the propagation of gravitational waves over cosmological distances, leading to modifications of their speed, damping, polarisation content and inferred luminosity distance. By comparing gravitational‐wave measurements to electromagnetic observations and to large‐scale structure surveys, researchers can test general relativity against alternative frameworks, place bounds on additional gravitational degrees of freedom, break degeneracies in cosmological parameters and search for new interactions between gravity and other fields. This synergy offers a window onto the behaviour of gravity in regimes that were previously inaccessible, with wide‐reaching implications for the Hubble tension, the nature of dark energy and the validity of the equivalence principle.
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Gravitational Wave Cosmology and Modified Gravity publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in gravitational wave cosmology and modified gravity across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Gravitational wave standard siren: A compact binary merger whose observed waveform directly yields its luminosity distance without reliance on a cosmic distance ladder.
Luminosity distance: A measure of the apparent brightness of a source as a function of its intrinsic emission and the expansion of the Universe.
Horndeski theory: The most general class of scalar–tensor gravitational theories with second‐order field equations, often used to model modifications to general relativity on cosmological scales.
Jordan frame: A formulation of modified gravity in which matter fields couple minimally to the metric, distinguishing it from the Einstein frame where the gravitational action takes a canonical form.
References
- Mirage of Luminal Modified Gravitational-Wave Propagation. Physical Review Letters (2023).
- Prospect of precision cosmology and testing general relativity using binary black holes – galaxies cross-correlation. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2024).
- Probing lens-induced gravitational-wave birefringence as a test of general relativity. Physical Review D (2023).
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