No Arabic abstract
We derive a simple relationship between the energy emitted in gravitational waves for a narrowband source and the distance to which that emission can be detected by a single detector. We consider linearly polarized, elliptically polarized, and unpolarized gravitational waves, and emission patterns appropriate for each of these cases. We ignore cosmological effects.
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.
The gravitational waveforms in the ghost-free bigravity theory exhibit deviations from those in general relativity. The main difference is caused by graviton oscillations in the bigravity theory. We investigate the prospects for the detection of the corrections to gravitational waveforms from coalescing compact binaries due to graviton oscillations and for constraining bigravity parameters with the gravitational wave observations. We consider the bigravity model discussed by the De Felice-Nakamura-Tanaka subset of the bigravity model, and the phenomenological model in which the bigravity parameters are treated as independent variables. In both models, the bigravity waveform shows strong amplitude modulation, and there can be a characteristic frequency of the largest peak of the amplitude, which depends on the bigravity parameters. We show that there is a detectable region of the bigravity parameters for the advanced ground-based laser interferometers, such as Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and KAGRA. This region corresponds to the effective graviton mass of $mu geq 10^{-17}~{rm cm}^{-1}$ for $tilde{c}-1 geq 10^{-19}$ in the phenomenological model, while $mu geq 10^{-16.5}~{rm cm}^{-1}$ for $kappaxi_c^2 geq 10^{0.5}$ in the De Felice-Nakamura-Tanaka subset of the bigravity model, respectively, where $tilde{c}$ is the propagation speed of the massive graviton and $kappaxi_c^2$ corresponds to the corrections to the gravitational constant in general relativity. These regions are not excluded by existing solar system tests. We also show that, in the case of $1.4-1.4M_{rm sun}$ binaries at the distance of $200~{rm Mpc}$, $logmu^2$ is determined with an accuracy of ${cal O}$(0.1)% at the 1$sigma$ level for a fiducial model with $mu^2=10^{-33}~{rm cm}^{-2}$ in the case of the phenomenological model.
With the advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors taking observations the detection of gravitational waves is expected within the next few years. Extracting astrophysical information from gravitational wave detections is a well-posed problem and thoroughly studied when detailed models for the waveforms are available. However, one motivation for the field of gravitational wave astronomy is the potential for new discoveries. Recognizing and characterizing unanticipated signals requires data analysis techniques which do not depend on theoretical predictions for the gravitational waveform. Past searches for short-duration un-modeled gravitational wave signals have been hampered by transient noise artifacts, or glitches, in the detectors. In some cases, even high signal-to-noise simulated astrophysical signals have proven difficult to distinguish from glitches, so that essentially any plausible signal could be detected with at most 2-3 $sigma$ level confidence. We have put forth the BayesWave algorithm to differentiate between generic gravitational wave transients and glitches, and to provide robust waveform reconstruction and characterization of the astrophysical signals. Here we study BayesWaves capabilities for rejecting glitches while assigning high confidence to detection candidates through analytic approximations to the Bayesian evidence. Analytic results are tested with numerical experiments by adding simulated gravitational wave transient signals to LIGO data collected between 2009 and 2010 and found to be in good agreement.
The direct measurement of gravitational waves is a powerful tool for surveying the population of black holes across the universe. The first gravitational wave catalog from LIGO has detected black holes as heavy as $sim50~M_odot$, colliding when our Universe was about half its current age. However, there is yet no unambiguous evidence of black holes in the intermediate-mass range of $10^{2-5}~M_odot$. Recent electromagnetic observations have hinted at the existence of IMBHs in the local universe; however, their masses are poorly constrained. The likely formation mechanisms of IMBHs are also not understood. Here we make the case that multiband gravitational wave astronomy --specifically, joint observations by space- and ground-based gravitational wave detectors-- will be able to survey a broad population of IMBHs at cosmological distances. By utilizing general relativistic simulations of merging black holes and state-of-the-art gravitational waveform models, we classify three distinct population of binaries with IMBHs in the multiband era and discuss what can be observed about each. Our studies show that multiband observations involving the upgraded LIGO detector and the proposed space-mission LISA would detect the inspiral, merger and ringdown of IMBH binaries out to redshift ~2. Assuming that next-generation detectors, Einstein Telescope, and Cosmic Explorer, are operational during LISAs mission lifetime, we should have multiband detections of IMBH binaries out to redshift ~5. To facilitate studies on multiband IMBH sources, here we investigate the multiband detectability of IMBH binaries. We provide analytic relations for the maximum redshift of multiband detectability, as a function of black hole mass, for various detector combinations. Our study paves the way for future work on what can be learned from IMBH observations in the era of multiband gravitational wave astronomy.
We describe the plans for a joint search for unmodelled gravitational wave bursts being carried out by the LIGO and TAMA collaborations using data collected during February-April 2003. We take a conservative approach to detection, requiring candidate gravitational wave bursts to be seen in coincidence by all four interferometers. We focus on some of the complications of performing this coincidence analysis, in particular the effects of the different alignments and noise spectra of the interferometers.