Cosmic superstrings, metastable strings and ultralight primordial black holes: from NANOGrav to LIGO and beyond

Abstract

While topologically stable cosmic strings are disfavoured by the recent observation of nHz stochastic gravitational waves (GW) by Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTA), e.g., NANOGrav, cosmic metastable strings and superstrings are not. However, because the gravitational waves from all classes of strings generally span a wide range of frequencies, they contradict LIGO's non-observation of stochastic gravitational waves at the $f\sim$ 25 Hz band for a substantial string-parameter space favoured by the PTA data. Suppose ultralight primordial black holes ($M_{\mathrm{BH}}<10^9$ g) existed in the early universe. In this case, they reduce the amplitude of the GWs at higher frequencies by providing an early matter-dominated phase, alleviating the tension between LIGO observation and PTA data. We show that the recent PTA data complemented by future LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) runs plus detectors such as LISA and ET would be able to dapple the properties and further search strategies of such ultralight primordial black holes which are otherwise fairly elusive as they evaporate in the early universe by Hawking radiation.

Comments: 29 pages, 11 figures, updated with VOS evolution for the string network and SNR computation in the strong signal limit, matches JHEP version