Broken blue-tilted inflationary gravitational waves: a joint analysis of NANOGrav 15-year and BICEP/Keck 2018 data

Abstract

Abstract Recently, the pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations have reported the evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) at nano-Hertz band. The spectrum of inflationary gravitational wave (IGW) is unknown, which might exhibit different power law at different frequency-bands, thus if the PTA signal is primordial, it will be significant to explore the underlying implications of current PTA and CMB data on IGW. In this Letter, we perform a joint Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis for a broken power-law spectrum of IGW with the NANOGrav 15-year and BICEP/Keck 2018 data. It is found that though the bestfit spectral tilt of IGW at PTA band is n PTA T = 2.42 +0.32 -0.91 , at CMB band the bestfit is n CMB T = 0.55 +0.37 -0.10 while a detectable amplitude of r with n CMB T ≃ 0 is still compatible. The implication of our results for inflation is also discussed.