Quadrupolar gravitational radiation as a test-bed for f(R)-gravity

The debate concerning the viability of f(R)-gravity as a natural extension of General Relativity could be realistically addressed by using results coming from binary pulsars like PSR 1913 + 16. To this end, we develop a quadrupolar approach to the gravitational radiation for a class of analytic f(R)-models. We show that experimental results are compatible with a consistent range of f(R)-models. This means that f(R)-gravity is not ruled out by the observations and gravitational radiation (in strong field regime) could be a test-bed for such theories. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.