The measurement of the inflationary stochastic gravitational-wave background
(SGWB) is one of the main goals of future GW experiments. In direct GW
experiments, an obstacle to achieving it is the isolation of the inflationary
SGWB from the other types of SGWB. In this paper, as a distinguishable
signature of the inflationary SGWB, we argue the detectability of its universal
property: antipodal correlations, i.e., correlations of GWs from the opposite
directions, as a consequence of the horizon re-entry. A phase-coherent method
has been known to be of no use to detect the angular correlations in SGWB due
to a problematic phase factor. We thus investigate whether we can construct a
phase-incoherent estimator of the antipodal correlations in the intensity map.
We find that, unfortunately, the answer is no: there is no estimator that is
sensitive to the antipodal correlations but does not suffer from the
problematic phase factor. Our analysis clarifies the importance of averaging in
defining the estimator and will give an insight on what kind of angular
correlations in SGWB is detectable or not.
Preprint
Comment: 11pages, 2 figures
Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology; Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics