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A.Mi. proposed and initiated the project. A.Mi. and K.Sc. coordinated and led the search. The enterprise wrapper, PTArcade (Mitridate et al. 2023, in preparation), used in this analysis was mainly developed by A.Mi., with help from D.W., K.D.O., J.N., R.v.E., T.S., and T.T. R.v.E. and T.S. developed the statistical tools needed to derive the K-ratio bounds. L.Z.K. derived the distributions of power-law fit parameters for characteristic strain spectra from SMBHB simulations. A.Mi. prepared all figures except those in Section 6.1, which were prepared by T.T.; Figure 18, which was prepared by V.L.; and Figure 22, which was prepared by R.R.L.d.S. A.Mi. and K.Sc. wrote the paper with help from K.B., K.D.O., S.Ve., and T.T.Contributions to specific analyses are as follows. K.Sc. led and discussed the results of the SIGW and IGW analyses, which were performed by D.W. and R.R.L.d.S. A.Af. and R.R.L.d.S. derived the constraints on the parameter space of the SIGW model. D.W. and R.R.L.d.S. derived the LVK and N eff bounds on the IGW model. A.Mi. led the PT analysis, which was performed by both A.Mi. and R.v.E.; A.Mi. and K.Sc. interpreted and discussed the results. The string analyses were led by K.D.O. and K.Sc., with K.D.O., K.Sc., and T.S. conducting the analyses; K.Sc. interpreted and discussed the results with help from K.D.O. and J.J.B.P. A.Mi. led the domain wall analysis, which was performed by both A.Mi. and D.W.; A.Mi. and K.Sc. interpreted and discussed the results. The ULDM analysis was coordinated by A.Mi., K.B., and T.T.; J.N. performed the analysis; and A.Mi., C.U., K.B., J.N., and T.T. interpreted and discussed the results. Finally, the substructure search was led by A.Mi. and T.T.; A.Mi., S.Ve., and V.L. performed the analysis; and A.Mi., S.Ve., V.L., and T.T. interpreted and discussed the results.The NANOGrav Collaboration receives support from National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center award Nos. 1430284 and 2020265, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, NSF AccelNet award No. 2114721, an NSERC Discovery Grant, and CIFAR. The Arecibo Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement (AST-1744119) by the University of Central Florida (UCF) in alliance with Universidad Ana G. Mendez (UAGM) and Yang Enterprises (YEI), Inc. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. NANOGrav is part of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA); we would like to thank our IPTA colleagues for their help with this paper.Part of this work was conducted using the High Performance Computing Cluster PALMA II at the University of Muenster (https://www.uni-muenster.de/IT/HPC). This work used the Maxwell computational resources operated at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg (Germany). This work was conducted in part using the HPC resources of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. The Tufts University High Performance Computing Cluster (https://it.tufts.edu/high-performance-computing) was utilized for some of the research reported in this paper. This research used the computational resources provided by the University of Central Florida's Advanced Research Computing Center.J.J.B.P. acknowledges the support by the PID2021-123703NB-C21 grant funded by MCIN/AEI /10. 13039/501100011033/ and by ERDF; "A way of making Europe," the Basque Government grant (IT-1628-22); and the Basque Foundation for Science (IKERBASQUE). L.B. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under award AST-1909933 and from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement under Cottrell Scholar Award No. 27553. P.R.B. is supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, grant No. ST/W000946/1. S.B. gratefully acknowledges the support of a Sloan Fellowship and the support of NSF under award No. 1815664. M.C. and S.R.T. acknowledge support from NSF AST-2007993. M.C. and N.S.P. were supported by the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data Intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) Fellowship. Support for this work was provided by the NSF through the Grote Reber Fellowship Program administered by Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Support for H.T.C. is provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program grant No. HST-HF2-51453.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. K.C. is supported by a UBC Four Year Fellowship (6456). M.E.D. acknowledges support from the Naval Research Laboratory by NASA under contract S-15633Y. T.D. and M.T.L. are supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Grant (AAG), award No. 2009468. The work of R.v.E., K. Sc., and T.S. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Research Training Group, GRK 2149: Strong and Weak Interactions-from Hadrons to Dark Matter. E.C.F. is supported by NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002. G.E.F., S.C.S., and S.J.V. are supported by NSF award PHY-2011772. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. A.D.J. and M.V. acknowledge support from the Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory President's and Director's Research and Development Fund. A.D.J. acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation. The work of N.La. and X.S. is partly supported by the George and Hannah Bolinger Memorial Fund in the College of Science at Oregon State University. N.La. acknowledges the support from Larry W. Martin and Joyce B. O'Neill Endowed Fellowship in the College of Science at Oregon State University. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). V.S.H.L. is supported by the DoE under contract DE-SC0011632. R.R.L.d.S. is supported by a research grant (29405) from VILLUM FONDEN. D.R.L. and M.A.M. are supported by NSF No. 1458952. M.A.M. is supported by NSF No. 2009425. C.M.F.M. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. NSF PHY-1748958 and AST-2106552. A.Mi. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Germany's Excellence Strategy-EXC 2121 Quantum Universe-390833306. The Dunlap Institute is funded by an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. K.D.O. was supported in part by NSF grant Nos. 2111738 and 2207267. T.T.P. acknowledges support from the Extragalactic Astrophysics Research Group at Eoetvoes Lorand University, funded by the Eoetvoes Lorand Research Network (ELKH), which was used during the development of this research. S.M.R. and I.H.S. are CIFAR Fellows. Portions of this work performed at NRL were supported by ONR 6.1 basic research funding. J.D.R. also acknowledges support from start-up funds from Texas Tech University. J.S. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-2202388 and acknowledges previous support by the NSF under award 1847938. S.R.T. acknowledges support from an NSF CAREER award No. 2146016. T.T.'s contribution to this work is supported by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, under contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. C.U. acknowledges support from BGU (Kreitman fellowship) and the Council for Higher Education and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Excellence fellowship). C.A.W. acknowledges support from CIERA, the Adler Planetarium, and the Brinson Foundation through a CIERA-Adler postdoctoral fellowship. O.Y. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-2139292. The work of K.Z. is also supported by a SimonsInvestigator award and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of HighEnergy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632.

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The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Search for Signals from New Physics

Publicated to:Astrophysical Journal Letters. 951 (1): L11- - 2023-07-01 951(1), DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acdc91

Authors: Afzal, Adeela; Agazie, Gabriella; Anumarlapudi, Akash M; Archibald, Anne; Arzoumanian, Zaven T; Baker, Paul; Becsy, Bence; Blanco-Pillado, Jose Juan; Blecha, Laura K; Boddy, Kimberly; Brazier, Adam R; Brook, Paul; Burke-Spolaor, Sarah; Burnette, Rand; Case, Robin; Charisi, Maria; Chatterjee, Shami; Chatziioannou, Katerina D; Cheeseboro, Belinda; Chen, Siyuan; Cohen, Tyler M; Cordes, James J; Cornish, Neil; Crawford, Fronefield; Cromartie, H Thankful; Crowter, Kathryn J; Cutler, Curt E; DeCesar, Megan; DeGan, Dallas B; Demorest, Paul; Deng, Heling; Dolch, Timothy; Drachler, Brendan; von Eckardstein, Richard C; Ferrara, Elizabeth; Fiore, William; Fonseca, Emmanuel E; Freedman, Gabriel; Garver-Daniels, Nate A; Gentile, Peter A; Gersbach, Kyle; Glaser, Joseph C; Good, Deborah; Guertin, Lydia; Gueltekin, Kayhan S; Hazboun, Jeffrey; Hourihane, Sophie; Islo, Kristina J; Jennings, Ross D; Johnson, Aaron L; Jones, Megan R; Kaiser, Andrew L; Kaplan, David; Kelley, Luke Zoltan; Kerr, Matthew S; Key, Joey; Laal, Nima T; Lam, Michael G; Lamb, William; W Lazio, T Joseph; Lee, Vincent S H; Lewandowska, Natalia R; Lino dos Santos, Rafael B; Littenberg, Tyson; Liu, Tingting R; Lorimer, Duncan; Luo, Jing S; Lynch, Ryan; Ma, Chung-Pei R; Madison, Dustin; McEwen, Alexander W; McKee, James A; McLaughlin, Maura; McMann, Natasha W; Meyers, Bradley M; Meyers, Patrick; Mingarelli, Chiara M F; Mitridate, Andrea; Nay, Jonathan; Natarajan, Priyamvada; Ng, Cherry J; Nice, David; Ocker, Stella Koch D; Olum, Ken T; Pennucci, Timothy; Perera, Benetge B P; Petrov, Polina S; Pol, Nihan A; Radovan, Henri M; Ransom, Scott S; Ray, Paul D; Romano, Joseph C; Sardesai, Shashwat; Schmiedekamp, Ann; Schmiedekamp, Carl; Schmitz, Kai; Schroeder, Tobias; Schult, Levi J; Shapiro-Albert, Brent; Siemens, Xavier; Simon, Joseph S; Siwek, Magdalena H; Stairs, Ingrid R; Stinebring, Daniel; Stovall, Kevin; Stratmann, Peter P; Sun, Jerry; Susobhanan, Abhimanyu K; Swiggum, Joseph; Taylor, Jacob R; Taylor, Stephen; Trickle, Tanner E; Turner, Jacob; Unal, Caner; Vallisneri, Michele; Verma, Sonali J; Vigeland, Sarah M; Wahl, Haley; Wang, Qiaohong A; Witt, Caitlin; Wright, David; Young, Olivia M; Zurek, Kathryn

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Abstract

The 15 yr pulsar timing data set collected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) shows positive evidence for the presence of a low-frequency gravitational-wave (GW) background. In this paper, we investigate potential cosmological interpretations of this signal, specifically cosmic inflation, scalar-induced GWs, first-order phase transitions, cosmic strings, and domain walls. We find that, with the exception of stable cosmic strings of field theory origin, all these models can reproduce the observed signal. When compared to the standard interpretation in terms of inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs), many cosmological models seem to provide a better fit resulting in Bayes factors in the range from 10 to 100. However, these results strongly depend on modeling assumptions about the cosmic SMBHB population and, at this stage, should not be regarded as evidence for new physics. Furthermore, we identify excluded parameter regions where the predicted GW signal from cosmological sources significantly exceeds the NANOGrav signal. These parameter constraints are independent of the origin of the NANOGrav signal and illustrate how pulsar timing data provide a new way to constrain the parameter space of these models. Finally, we search for deterministic signals produced by models of ultralight dark matter (ULDM) and dark matter substructures in the Milky Way. We find no evidence for either of these signals and thus report updated constraints on these models. In the case of ULDM, these constraints outperform torsion balance and atomic clock constraints for ULDM coupled to electrons, muons, or gluons.

Keywords