Speaker
Description
The current detection of gravitational waves (GW) in the audible range involves the construction of detectors specifically dedicated, covering a wide spectrum but requiring costly construction. Future detectors are expected to cover the mHz frequency, while the pulsar signal based detection covers the nHz range, leaving the μHz regime largely unexplored. Thanks to their onboard atomic clocks and orbits determined to within a centimeter, constellations of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), such as GPS and Galileo, offer free access to more than 30 years of clock and orbital data for tests of fundamental physics. In this talk, we present a framework for calculating the deviation in the evolution of GNSS orbits induced by GW signals. We show that when a GW interacts resonantly with a GNSS satellite’s orbit, the effects are amplified, leading to a secular detectable evolution of Keplerian parameters. Therefore, the long time series of GNSS orbital products can be used to bridge the gap in the μHz range of continuous GW emitted by individual binary sources or the stochastic GW background. Finally, we demonstrate that the orbital deviations induced by resonant GW are coherent across the entire constellation, enabling a satellite network to disentangle GW effects from satellite systematic effects.
