Award Date

August 2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Committee Member

Carl-Johan Olaf Haster

Second Committee Member

Ashkan Salamat

Third Committee Member

Zhaohuan Zhu

Fourth Committee Member

Monika Neda

Number of Pages

72

Abstract

Under the assumptions of General Relativity (GR), gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light and their mediation can be represented as a particle through a massless graviton. We investigate the impact and observability of the presence of a massive graviton, how such a modification to GR would also modify the observed gravitational waves from astrophysical sources, and how this effect can be used as an independent measurement of cosmmological parameters, including the Hubble parameter H0. We simulate the impact of a massive graviton on compact binary coalescence observation in a near-future LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA interferometer network through a modification to the gravitational wave phase in the post-Newtonian framework. Our analysis finds that if we assume the presence of a graviton with a Compton wavelength of λG ≈ 1015m, corresponding to a mass mG ≤ 10−18eV/c2, we can utilize a population of 50 binary black hole observations to constrain H0 to a similar precision as current gravitational wave constraints. More sensitive observatories will be necessary to probe lower values in the graviton mass range and fully exploit this method.

Keywords

black hole binary; general relativity; gravitational waves; Hubble constant; post-Newtonian expansion

Disciplines

Astrophysics and Astronomy | Physics

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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