Potential of Radio Telescopes as High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Detectors

In the presence of magnetic fields, gravitational waves are converted into photons and vice versa. We demonstrate that this conversion leads to a distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which can serve as a detector for MHz to GHz gravitational wave sources active before reionization. The measurements of the radio telescope EDGES can be cast as a bound on the gravitational wave amplitude, h(c) < 10(-21) (10(-12)) at 78 MHz, for the strongest (weakest) cosmic magnetic fields allowed by current astrophysical and cosmological constraints. Similarly, the results of ARCADE 2 imply h(c) < 10(-24) (10(-14)) at 3-30 GHz. For the strongest magnetic fields, these constraints exceed current laboratory constraints by about 7 orders of magnitude. Future advances in 21 cm astronomy may conceivably push these bounds below the sensitivity of cosmological constraints on the total energy density of gravitational waves.