Nicolas Herman (Université de Namur)

In this talk the possibility to detect gravitational waves (GW) from planetary-mass primordial black hole (PBH) binaries or the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) with electromagnetic (EM) detectors of high-frequency GWs is investigated. We consider two patented experimental designs, based on the inverse Gertsenshtein effect, in which incoming GWs passing through a static magnetic field induce EM excitations inside either a TM cavity or a TEM waveguide. The frequency response of the detectors is computed for post-Newtonian GW waveforms. We find that such EM detectors based on current technology may achieve a strain sensitivity down to h ∼ 10⁻³⁰, which generates an EM induced power of 10⁻¹⁰ W. This allows the detection of PBH binary mergers of mass around 10⁻⁵ M_⊙ if they constitute more than 0.01 percent of the dark matter, as suggested by recent microlensing observations. We envision that this class of detectors could also be used to detect cosmological GW backgrounds and probe sources in the early Universe at energies up to the grand unified theory scale.