No Arabic abstract
Gravitational waves, like light, can be gravitationally lensed by massive astrophysical objects such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Strong gravitational-wave lensing, forecasted at a reasonable rate in ground-based gravitational-wave detectors such as Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and KAGRA, produces multiple images separated in time by minutes to months. These images appear as repeated events in the detectors: gravitational-wave pairs, triplets, or quadruplets with identical frequency evolution originating from the same sky location. To search for these images, we need to, in principle, analyze all viable combinations of individual events present in the gravitational-wave catalogs. An increasingly pressing problem is that the number of candidate pairs that we need to analyse grows rapidly with the increasing number of single-event detections. At design sensitivity, one may have as many as $mathcal O(10^5)$ event pairs to consider. To meet the ever-increasing computational requirements, we develop a fast and precise Bayesian methodology to analyse strongly lensed event pairs, enabling future searches. The methodology works by replacing the prior used in the analysis of one strongly lensed gravitational-wave image by the posterior of another image; the computation is then further sped up by a pre-computed lookup table. We demonstrate how the methodology can be applied to any number of lensed images, enabling fast studies of strongly lensed quadruplets.
Gravitational-wave (GW) observations by a network of ground-based laser interferometric detectors allow us to probe the nature of GW polarizations. This would be an interesting test of general relativity (GR), since GR predicts only two polarization modes while there are theories of gravity that predict up to six polarization modes. The ability of GW observations to probe the nature of polarizations is limited by the available number of linearly independent detectors in the network. (To extract all polarization modes, there should be at least as many detectors as the polarization modes.) Strong gravitational lensing of GWs offers a possibility to significantly increase the effective number of detectors in the network. Due to strong lensing (e.g., by galaxies), multiple copies of the same signal can be observed with time delays of several minutes to weeks. Owing to the rotation of the earth, observation of the multiple copies of the same GW signal would allow the network to measure different combinations of the same polarizations. This effectively multiplies the number of detectors in the network. Focusing on strongly lensed signals from binary black hole mergers that produce two observable images, using Bayesian model selection and assuming simple polarization models, we show that our ability to distinguish between polarization models is significantly improved.
Gravitational wave (GW) echoes, if they exist, would be a probe to the near-horizon physics of black hole. In this brief report, we performed the Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis to search for echo signal in all GWTC-1 and O3 GW events. We focus on the Insprial-Merger-Ringdown-Echo (IMRE) waveform, and apply the Bayesian model selection to compare the IMRE result with IMRs (no echo). We find no statistically significant ($<1sigma$ combined) evidence for the GW echoes and only individual GW events with the echoes at $1sim 2sigma$ significance.
It has been recently shown that quadruply lensed gravitational-wave (GW) events due to coalescing binaries can be localized to one or just a few galaxies, even in the absence of an electromagnetic counterpart. We discuss how this can be used to extract information on modified GW propagation, which is a crucial signature of modifications of gravity at cosmological scales. We show that, using quadruply lensed systems, it is possible to constrain the parameter $Xi_0$ that characterizes modified GW propagation, without the need of imposing a prior on $H_0$. A LIGO/Virgo/Kagra network at target sensitivity might already get a significant measurement of $Xi_0$, while a third generation GW detector such as the Einstein Telescope could reach a very interesting accuracy.
The first-order phase transitions in the early universe are one of the well-known sources which release the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs). In this paper, we study the contribution of an external static and strong magnetic field on the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs) expected during QCD phase transition. In the light of the strongly magnetized hot QCD Equation of State which deviated from the ideal gas up to one-loop approximation, we estimate two phenomenologically important quantities: peak-frequency redshifted to today ($f_{rm peak}$) and GW strain amplitude ($h^2 Omega_{gw}$). The trace anomaly induced by the magnetized hot QCD matter around phase transition generates the stochastic background of GW with the peak-frequencies lower than the ideal gas-based signal (around nHz). Instead, the strain amplitudes corresponding to the peak frequencies are of the same order of magnitudes of the expected signal from ideal gas. This may be promising in the sense that although the strong magnetic field could mask the expected stochastic background of GWs but merely by upgrading the frequency sensitivity of detectors in the future, the magnetized GW is expected to be identified. Faced with the projected reach of detectors EPTA, IPTA, and SKA, we find that for the tail of the magnetized GW signals there remains a mild possibility of detection as it can reach the projected sensitivity of SKA.
Strong gravitational lensing is a gravitational wave (GW) propagation effect that influences the inferred GW source parameters and the cosmological environment. Identifying strongly-lensed GW images is challenging as waveform amplitude magnification is degenerate with a shift in the source intrinsic mass and redshift. However, even in the geometric-optics limit, type II strongly-lensed images cannot be fully matched by type I (or unlensed) waveform templates, especially with large binary mass ratios and orbital inclination angles. We propose to use this mismatch to distinguish individual type II images. Using planned noise spectra of Cosmic Explorer, Einstein Telescope and LIGO Voyager, we show that a significant fraction of type II images can be distinguished from unlensed sources, given sufficient SNR ($sim 30$). Incorporating models on GW source population and lens population, we predict that the yearly detection rate of lensed GW sources with detectable type II images is 172.2, 118.2 and 27.4 for CE, ET and LIGO Voyager, respectively. Among these detectable events, 33.1%, 7.3% and 0.22% will be distinguishable via their type II images with a log Bayes factor larger than 10. We conclude that such distinguishable events are likely to appear in the third-generation detector catalog; our strategy will significantly supplement existing strong lensing search strategies.