Induced Gravitational Waves with Kination Era for Recent Pulsar Timing Array Signals

Abstract

The evidence of the stochastic gravitational-wave background around the nano-hertz frequency range was recently found by worldwide pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations. One of the cosmological explanations is the gravitational waves induced by enhanced curvature perturbations, but the issue of primordial black hole (PBH) overproduction in this scenario was pointed out in the literature. Motivated by this issue and the $\Omega_\text{GW} \sim f^2$ scaling suggested by the data, we study the gravitational waves induced in a cosmological epoch dominated by a stiff fluid ($w=1$) and find that they can safely explain the PTA data well without PBH overproduction.