Probing Kalb-Ramond field with extreme mass ratio inspirals

Abstract

The extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are emerging as precision laboratories for testing the gravity beyond general relativity. In this work, we investigate the Lorentz symmetry breaking (LSB) effect induced by the Kalb-Ramond (KR) field on the gravitational waveforms from the EMRI system. We observe that the LSB parameter $l$ appears in the leading order for the corrections of energy and angular momentum fluxes, and as $|l|$ increases, the differences in EMRI waveforms between the KR black hole and Schwarzschild black hole become more pronounced. We note that the LSB effect becomes detectable by LISA for values of $|l|\sim 10^{-6}$ with a one-year observation period. Furthermore, we use the Fisher information matrix (FIM) approach for the parameter estimation and find the detection error for $l$ can be constrained to $\Delta l \sim 10^{-5}$ at $\mathrm{SNR} = 20$, demonstrating the potential of space-based gravitational wave detectors to rigorously test the KR field.