Coherent State Description of Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Holes

by Achintya Sajeendran

Tuesday 10 Nov 2026, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Stockholm

AlbaNova A5:1041 - CoPS grupprum (AlbaNova Main Building)

Sugumi Kanno, Jiro Soda, and Akira Taniguchi

Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 061404 (2026)

Quantum mechanics is the fundamental framework of nature, and gravitational waves from binary black holes during the inspiral phase should likewise be analyzed quantum mechanically. It is commonly assumed that their classical description corresponds to a coherent state, so any deviation would signal genuinely quantum nature of gravity. We show that the coherent-state description reproduces classical gravitational waves at leading order, while next-order effects generate squeezed states of gravitons. For GW150914, we estimate the squeezing parameter to be ∼10−4. We find that gravitational waves from binary black holes are well described by a coherent state.