Gravitational wave stochastic background from cosmological particle decay

Abstract

We assume that the cosmological dark matter is composed of massive neutral scalar particles that decay into two massless particles. The decay produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs) via a “memory effect” mechanism. We calculate the spectral amplitude and slope of the resulting background, which is frequency independent (flat). We discuss its potential observability and show that the resulting background might dominate the cosmological GW background at frequencies above ≈10^{10} Hz. Penrose has proposed a cosmological model in which dark matter particles have the Planck mass and decay into two gravitons. For these, the spectrum has an additional “direct” contribution from the decay products, which we also calculate. At low frequencies, this direct contribution also has a flat spectrum but with a much smaller amplitude than the memory part.