Reducing the weak lensing noise for the gravitational wave Hubble diagram using the non-Gaussianity of the magnification distribution

Abstract

Gravitational wave sources are a promising cosmological standard candle because their intrinsic luminosities are determined by fundamental physics (and are insensitive to dust extinction). They are, however, affected by weak lensing magnification due to the gravitational lensing from structures along the line of sight. This lensing is a source of uncertainty in the distance determination, even in the limit of perfect standard candle measurements. It is commonly believed that the uncertainty in the distance to an ensemble of gravitational wave sources is limited by the standard deviation of the lensing magnification distribution divided by the square root of the number of sources. Here we show that by exploiting the non-Gaussian nature of the lensing magnification distribution, we can improve this distance determination, typically by a factor of 2--3; we provide a fitting formula for the effective distance accuracy as a function of redshift for sources where the lensing noise dominates.

matches PRD accepted version (expanded description of the cosmological parameter space + minor changes)

References in corpus (5)

• Observational Constraints on the Nature of the Dark Energy: First Cosmological Results from the ESSENCE Supernova Survey
• Precision of Hubble constant derived using black hole binary absolute distances and statistical redshift information
• Prompt Shocks in the Gas Disk Around a Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole Binary
• Localizing coalescing massive black hole binaries with gravitational waves
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Beyond Concordance Cosmology with Magnification of Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens
• Tracing the redshift evolution of Hubble parameter with gravitational-wave standard sirens