Making light of gravitational-waves

Abstract Mixing between photons and low-mass bosons is well considered in the literature. The particular case of interest here is with hypothetical gravitons, as we are concerned with the direct conversion of gravitons into photons in the presence of an external magnetic field. We examine whether such a process could produce direct low-frequency radio counterparts to gravitational-wave events. Our work differs from previous work in the literature in that we use the results of numerical simulations to demonstrate that, although a single such event may be undetectable without at least 10 5 dipoles, an unresolved gravitational wave background from neutron star mergers could be potentially detectable with a lunar telescope composed of 10 3 elements. This is provided the gravitational wave spectrum only experiences exponential damping above 80 kHz, a full order of magnitude above the limit achieved by present simulation results. In addition, the extrapolation cannot have a power-law slope ≲ − 2 (for 100 hours of observation time) and background and foregrounds must be effectively subtracted to obtain the signal. This does not make detection impossible, but suggests it may be unlikely. Furthermore, assuming a potentially detectable spectral scenario we show that, for the case when no detection is made by a lunar array, a lower bound, competitive with those from Lorentz-invariance violation, may be placed on the energy-scale of quantum gravitational effects. The SKA is shown to have very limited prospects for the detection of either a single merger or a background.