No Arabic abstract
The basic constituent of many space-borne gravitational missions, in particular for interferometric gravitational waves detectors, is the so-called link made out of a satellite sending an electromagnetic beam to a second satellite. We illustrate how, by measuring the time derivative of the frequency of the received beam, the link behaves as a differential, time-delayed dynamometer in which the effect of gravity is exactly equivalent to an effective differential force applied to the two satellites. We also show that this differential force gives an integrated measurement of curvature along the beam. Finally, we discuss how this approach can be implemented to benefit the data analysis of gravitational wave detectors.
Time-delay interferometry is put forward to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of space-borne gravitational wave detectors by canceling the large laser phase noise with different combinations of measured data. Based on the Michelson data combination, the sensitivity function of the detector can be obtained by averaging the all-sky wave source positions. At present, there are two main methods to encode gravitational wave signal into detector. One is to adapt gravitational wave polarization angle depending on the arm orientation in the gravitational wave frame, and the other is to divide the gravitational wave signal into plus and cross polarizations in the detector frame. Although there are some attempts using the first method to provide the analytical expression of sensitivity function, only a semianalytical one could be obtained. Here, starting with the second method, we demonstrate the equivalence of both methods. First time to obtain the full analytical expression of sensitivity function, which provides a fast and accurate mean to evaluate and compare the performance of different space-borne detectors, such as LISA and TianQin.
General Relativity predicts only two tensor polarization modes for gravitational waves while at most six possible polarization modes of gravitational waves are allowed in the general metric theory of gravity. The number of polarization modes is totally determined by the specific modified theory of gravity. Therefore, the determination of polarization modes can be used to test gravitational theory. We introduce a concrete data analysis pipeline for a single space-based detector such as LISA to detect the polarization modes of gravitational waves. Apart from being able to detect mixtures of tensor and extra polarization modes, this method also has the added advantage that no waveform model is needed and monochromatic gravitational waves emitted from any compact binary system with known sky position and frequency can be used. We apply the data analysis pipeline to the reference source J0806.3+1527 of TianQin with 90-days simulation data, and we show that $alpha$ viewed as an indicative of the intrinsic strength of the extra polarization component relative to the tensor modes can be limited below 0.5 for LISA and below 0.2 for Taiji. We investigate the possibility to detect the nontensorial polarization modes with the combined network of LISA, TianQin and Taiji and find that $alpha$ can be limited below 0.2.
We consider a class of proposed gravitational wave detectors based on multiple atomic interferometers separated by large baselines and referenced by common laser systems. We compute the sensitivity limits of these detectors due to intrinsic phase noise of the light sources, non-inertial motion of the light sources, and atomic shot noise and compare them to sensitivity limits for traditional light interferometers. We find that atom interferometers and light interferometers are limited in a nearly identical way by intrinsic phase noise and that both require similar mitigation strategies (e.g. multiple arm instruments) to reach interesting sensitivities. The sensitivity limit from motion of the light sources is slightly different and favors the atom interferometers in the low-frequency limit, although the limit in both cases is severe.
Employing the Fisher information matrix analysis, we estimate parameter errors of TianQin and LISA for monochromatic gravitational waves. With the long-wavelength approximation we derive analytical formulas for the parameter estimation errors. We separately analyze the effects of the amplitude modulation due to the changing orientation of the detector plane and the Doppler modulation due to the translational motion of the center of the detector around the Sun. We disclose that in the low frequency regime there exist different patterns in angular resolutions and estimation errors of sources parameters between LISA and TianQin, the angular resolution falls off as $S_n(f)/f^2$ for TianQin but $S_n(f)$ for LISA, and the estimation errors of the other parameters fall off as $sqrt{S_n(f)}/f$ for TianQin but $sqrt{S_n(f)}$ for LISA. In the medium frequency regime we observe the same pattern where the angular resolution falls off as $S_n(f)/f^2$ and the estimation errors of the other parameters fall off as $sqrt{S_n(f)}$ for both TianQin and LISA. In the high frequency regime, the long-wavelength approximation fails, we numerically calculate the parameter estimation errors for LISA and TianQin and find that the parameter estimation errors measured by TianQin are smaller than those by LISA.
Gravitational waves are perturbations of the metric of space-time. Six polarizations are possible, although general relativity predicts that only two such polarizations, tensor plus and tensor cross are present for gravitational waves. We give the analytical formulas for the antenna response functions for the six polarizations which are valid for any equal-arm interferometric gravitational-wave detectors without optical cavities in the arms.The response function averaged over the source direction and polarization angle decreases at high frequencies which deteriorates the signal-to-noise ratio registered in the detector. At high frequencies, the averaged response functions for the tensor and breathing modes fall of as $1/f^2$, the averaged response function for the longitudinal mode falls off as $1/f$ and the averaged response function for the vector mode falls off as $ln(f)/f^2$.