Gravitational Waves & Multidimensional Spacetime: Experiments & Detection

Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
1 reply · 1K views
Guthrie Prentice
Messages
2
Reaction score
0
So I saw that claims are being made that LIGO may have detected gravitational waves. http://www.nature.com/news/has-giant-ligo-experiment-seen-gravitational-waves-1.18449

My question is, if the universe were in fact multidimensional as string theory predicts, would gravitational waves propagate via the inverse cube law or higher, or take shortcuts as suggested by these papers? http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0504096 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603045 Also, would such propagation be detectable experimentally?

Thanks.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Our universe does not have large extra dimensions where gravity would extend normally, otherwise we would see massive deviations from the inverse square law (for forces). There are some exotic models which would give some chance to observe interactions via those extra dimensions, but the inverse square law is a really good approximation.