Circularly Polarized Gravitational Wave Background Search with a Network of Space-borne Triangular Detectors

Abstract: Circularly polarized gravitational wave backgrounds are predicted in many well-motivated models of inflation and phase transitions involving spontaneous parity violation. In this work, we investigate the detection of such parity-violating signals with the network of two space-borne triangular detectors. We derive the general analytical formula for the overlap reduction functions of networks composed of two triangular detectors, by exploiting the system's symmetrical properties under the long-wave approximation. Based on these results, we further assess the detectability of a parity-violating background with alternative LISA-Taiji network configurations. We find that the sensitivity to the parity-violating component can be significantly enhanced at low frequencies by adjusting the orientation of Taiji's constellation plane. This sensitivity gain is approximately an order of magnitude around the millihertz band, making the peak sensitivity comparable to that of the total intensity. This provides a promising opportunity to constrain various parity-violating theories in the millihertz band with upcoming space-borne detectors.