No Arabic abstract
Waveforms of gravitational waves provide information about a variety of parameters for the binary system merging. However, standard calculations have been performed assuming a FLRW universe with no perturbations. In reality this assumption should be dropped: we show that the inclusion of cosmological perturbations translates into corrections to the estimate of astrophysical parameters derived for the merging binary systems. We compute corrections to the estimate of the luminosity distance due to velocity, volume, lensing and gravitational potential effects. Our results show that the amplitude of the corrections will be negligible for current instruments, mildly important for experiments like the planned DECIGO, and very important for future ones such as the Big Bang Observer.
Dimensional flow, the scale dependence of the dimensionality of spacetime, is a feature shared by many theories of quantum gravity (QG). We present the first study of the consequences of QG dimensional flow for the luminosity distance scaling of gravitational waves in the frequency ranges of LIGO and LISA. We find generic modifications with respect to the standard general-relativistic scaling, largely independent of specific QG proposals. We constrain these effects using two examples of multimessenger standard sirens, the binary neutron-star merger GW170817 and a simulated supermassive black-hole merger event detectable with LISA. We apply these constraints to various QG candidates, finding that the quantum geometries of group field theory, spin foams and loop quantum gravity can give rise to observable signals in the gravitational-wave spin-2 sector. Our results complement and improve GW propagation-speed bounds on modified dispersion relations. Under more model-dependent assumptions, we also show that bounds on quantum geometry can be strengthened by solar-system tests.
We make forecasts for the impact a future midband space-based gravitational wave experiment, most sensitive to $10^{-2}- 10$ Hz, could have on potential detections of cosmological stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWBs). Specific proposed midband experiments considered are TianGo, B-DECIGO and AEDGE. We propose a combined power-law integrated sensitivity (CPLS) curve combining GW experiments over different frequency bands, which shows the midband improves sensitivity to SGWBs by up to two orders of magnitude at $10^{-2} - 10$ Hz. We consider GW emission from cosmic strings and phase transitions as benchmark examples of cosmological SGWBs. We explicitly model various astrophysical SGWB sources, most importantly from unresolved black hole mergers. Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo, we demonstrated that midband experiments can, when combined with LIGO A+ and LISA, significantly improve sensitivities to cosmological SGWBs and better separate them from astrophysical SGWBs. In particular, we forecast that a midband experiment improves sensitivity to cosmic string tension $Gmu$ by up to a factor of $10$, driven by improved component separation from astrophysical sources. For phase transitions, a midband experiment can detect signals peaking at $0.1 - 1$ Hz, which for our fiducial model corresponds to early Universe temperatures of $T_*sim 10^4 - 10^6$ GeV, generally beyond the reach of LIGO and LISA. The midband closes an energy gap and better captures characteristic spectral shape information. It thus substantially improves measurement of the properties of phase transitions at lower energies of $T_* sim O(10^3)$ GeV, potentially relevant to new physics at the electroweak scale, whereas in this energy range LISA alone will detect an excess but not effectively measure the phase transition parameters. Our modelling code and chains are publicly available.
We analyze the propagation of high-frequency gravitational waves (GW) in scalar-tensor theories of gravity, with the aim of examining properties of cosmological distances as inferred from GW measurements. By using symmetry principles, we first determine the most general structure of the GW linearized equations and of the GW energy momentum tensor, assuming that GW move with the speed of light. Modified gravity effects are encoded in a small number of parameters, and we study the conditions for ensuring graviton number conservation in our covariant set-up. We then apply our general findings to the case of GW propagating through a perturbed cosmological space-time, deriving the expressions for the GW luminosity distance $d_L^{({rm GW})}$ and the GW angular distance $d_A^{({rm GW})}$. We prove for the first time the validity of Etherington reciprocity law $d_L^{({rm GW})},=,(1+z)^2,d_A^{({rm GW})}$ for a perturbed universe within a scalar-tensor framework. We find that besides the GW luminosity distance, also the GW angular distance can be modified with respect to General Relativity. We discuss implications of this result for gravitational lensing, focussing on time-delays of lensed GW and lensed photons emitted simultaneously during a multimessenger event. We explicitly show how modified gravity effects compensate between different coefficients in the GW time-delay formula: lensed GW arrive at the same time as their lensed electromagnetic counterparts, in agreement with causality constraints.
The observation of binary neutron star merger GW170817, along with its optical counterpart, provided the first constraint on the Hubble constant $H_0$ using gravitational wave standard sirens. When no counterpart is identified, a galaxy catalog can be used to provide the necessary redshift information. However, the true host might not be contained in a catalog which is not complete out to the limit of gravitational-wave detectability. These electromagnetic and gravitational-wave selection effects must be accounted for. We describe and implement a method to estimate $H_0$ using both the counterpart and the galaxy catalog standard siren methods. We perform a series of mock data analyses using binary neutron star mergers to confirm our ability to recover an unbiased estimate of $H_0$. Our simulations used a simplified universe with no redshift uncertainties or galaxy clustering, but with different magnitude-limited catalogs and assumed host galaxy properties, to test our treatment of both selection effects. We explore how the incompleteness of catalogs affects the final measurement of $H_0$, as well as the effect of weighting each galaxys likelihood of being a host by its luminosity. In our most realistic simulation, where the simulated catalog is about three times denser than the density of galaxies in the local universe, we find that a 4.4% measurement precision can be reached using galaxy catalogs with 50% completeness and $sim 250$ binary neutron star detections with sensitivity similar to that of Advanced LIGOs second observing run.
Third-generation gravitational wave detectors, such as the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, will detect a bunch of gravitational-wave (GW) signals originating from the coalescence of binary neutron star (BNS) and binary black hole (BBH) systems out to the higher redshifts, $zsim 5-10$. There is a potential concern that some of the GW signals detected at a high statistical significance eventually overlap with each other, and the parameter estimation of such an overlapping system can differ from the one expected from a single event. Also, there are certainly overlapping systems in which one of the overlapping events has a low signal-to-noise ratio $lesssim 4$, and is thus unable to be clearly detected. Those system will potentially be misidentified with a single GW event, and the estimated parameters of binary GWs can be biased. We estimate the occurrence rate of those overlapping events. We find that the numbers of overlapping events are $sim 200$ per day for BNSs and a few per hour for BBHs. Then we study the statistical impacts of these overlapping GWs on a parameter estimation based on the Fisher matrix analysis. Our finding is that the overlapping signals produce neither large statistical errors nor serious systematic biases on the parameters of binary systems, unless the coalescence time and the redshifted chirp masses of the two overlapping GWs are very close to each other, i.e., $|mathcal{M}_{z1}-mathcal{M}_{z2}|lesssim10^{-4} ,(10^{-1}),M_odot$ and $|t_{rm c1}-t_{rm c2}|lesssim10^{-2},(10^{-1})$,s for BNSs (BBHs). The occurrence rate of such a closely overlapping event is shown to be much smaller than one per year with the third-generation detectors.