Improving parameter estimation accuracy with torsion-bar antennas

Abstract

We propose a new antenna configuration of a torsion-bar antenna (TOBA) and study its performance. A TOBA is a novel type of an antenna for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) which consists of two bar-shaped orthogonal test masses. Previously only the rotation of the bars on the horizontal plane had been considered as output signals. In this paper, we introduce a new antenna configuration for a TOBA to incorporate two additional outputs by measuring the rotation of the bars on the vertical planes. Such a triple-output TOBA can be regarded as a network of three coincident but misaligned interferometric detectors. We investigate its event detection rate and its parameter accuracies using Fisher analysis. We find that since the triple-output TOBA can discriminate two polarization modes of a short-duration GW signal even with a single antenna thanks to having three independent outputs, it improves the detection rate and the accuracies of waveform parameters drastically.

14 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
• A 400 solar mass black hole in the Ultraluminous X-ray source M82 X-1 accreting close to its Eddington limit
• Upper Limit on Gravitational Wave Backgrounds at 0.2 Hz with Torsion-bar Antenna
• Torsion bar antenna in the proper reference frame with rotation