No Arabic abstract
Core-collapse supernovae emit on the order of 3x10^53 ergs in high-energy neutrinos over a time of order 10 seconds, and so decrease their mass by about 0.2 solar mass. If the explosion is nearly spherically symmetric, there will be little gravitational wave emission. Nevertheless, the sudden decrease of mass of the progenitor may cause a change in the gravitational time delay of signals from a nearby pulsar. We calculate the change in arrival times as successive pulses pass through the neutrino shell at different times, and find that the effect may be detectable in ideal circumstances.
Pulsar timing experiments are currently searching for gravitational waves, and this dissertation focuses on the development and study of the pulsar timing residual models used for continuous wave searches. The first goal of this work is to re-present much of the fundamental physics and mathematics concepts behind the calculations and theory used in pulsar timing. While there exist many reference sources in the literature, I try to offer a fully self-contained explanation of the fundamentals of this research which I hope the reader will find helpful. The next goal broadly speaking has been to further develop the mathematics behind the currently used pulsar timing models for detecting gravitational waves with pulsar timing experiments. I classify four regimes of interest, governed by frequency evolution and wavefront curvature effects incorporated into the timing residual models. Of these four regimes the plane-wave models are well established in previous literature. I add a new regime which I label Fresnel, as I show it becomes important for significant Fresnel numbers describing the curvature of the gravitational wavefront. Then I give two in-depth studies. The first forecasts the ability of future pulsar timing experiments to probe and measure these Fresnel effects. The second further generalizes the models to a cosmologically expanding universe, and I show how the Hubble constant can be measured directly in the most generalized pulsar timing residual model. This offers future pulsar timing experiments the possibility of being able to procure a purely gravitational wave-based measurement of the Hubble constant. The final chapter shows the initial steps taken to extend this work in the future toward Doppler tracking experiments.
We discuss the prospects of gravitational lensing of gravitational waves (GWs) coming from core-collapse supernovae (CCSN). As the CCSN GW signal can only be detected from within our own Galaxy and the local group by current and upcoming ground-based GW detectors, we focus on microlensing. We introduce a new technique based on analysis of the power spectrum and association of peaks of the power spectrum with the peaks of the amplification factor to identify lensed signals. We validate our method by applying it on the CCSN-like mock signals lensed by a point mass lens. We find that the lensed and unlensed signal can be differentiated using the association of peaks by more than one sigma for lens masses larger than 150 solar masses. We also study the correlation integral between the power spectra and corresponding amplification factor. This statistical approach is able to differentiate between unlensed and lensed signals for lenses as small as 15 solar masses. Further, we demonstrate that this method can be used to estimate the mass of a lens in case the signal is lensed. The power spectrum based analysis is general and can be applied to any broad band signal and is especially useful for incoherent signals.
Assessing the probability that two or more gravitational waves (GWs) are lensed images of the same source requires an understanding of the image properties, including their relative phase shifts in strong lensing (SL). For non-precessing, circular binaries dominated by quadrupole radiation these phase shifts are degenerate with either a shift in the coalescence phase or a detector and inclination dependent shift in the orientation angle. This degeneracy is broken by the presence of higher harmonic modes with $|m| e 2$ in the former and $|m| e l$ in the latter. Precession or eccentricity will also break this degeneracy. This implies that lensed GWs will not necessarily be consistent with (unlensed) predictions from general relativity (GR). Therefore, unlike EM lensing, GW SL can lead to images with an observable modified phase evolution. However, for a wide parameter space, the lensed waveform is similar enough to an unlensed waveform that detection pipelines will still find it. For present detectors, templates with a shifted detector-dependent orientation angle have SNR differences of less than $1%$ for mass ratios up to 0.1, and less than $5%$ for precession parameters up to 0.5 and eccentricities up to 0.4 at 20Hz. The mismatch is lower than $10%$ with the alternative detector-independent coalescence phase shift. Nonetheless, for a loud enough source, even with one image it may be possible to directly identify it as a SL image from its non-GR waveform. In more extreme cases, lensing may lead to considerable distortions, and the lensed GWs may be undetected with current searches. Nevertheless, an exact template with a phase shift in Fourier space can always be constructed to fit any lensed GW. We conclude that an optimal search strategy would incorporate phase information in all stages, with an exact treatment in the final assessment of the probability of multiple lensed events.
We study how to probe bispectra of stochastic gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays. The bispectrum is a key to probe the origin of stochastic gravitational waves. In particular, the shape of the bispectrum carries valuable information of inflation models. We show that an appropriate filter function for three point correlations enables us to extract a specific configuration of momentum triangles in bispectra. We also calculate the overlap reduction functions and discuss strategy for detecting the bispectrum with multiple pulsars.
We describe the design of a gravitational wave timing array, a novel scheme that can be used to search for low-frequency gravitational waves by monitoring continuous gravitational waves at higher frequencies. We show that observations of gravitational waves produced by Galactic binaries using a space-based detector like LISA provide sensitivity in the nanohertz to microhertz band. While the expected sensitivity of this proposal is not competitive with other methods, it fills a gap in frequency space around the microhertz regime, which is above the range probed by current pulsar timing arrays and below the expected direct frequency coverage of LISA. The low-frequency extension of sensitivity does not require any experimental design change to space-based gravitational wave detectors, and can be achieved with the data products that would already be collected by them.