Weakly Lensed Gravitational Waves: Probing Cosmic Structures with Wave-Optics Features

Abstract

Every signal propagating through the universe is at least weakly lensed by the intervening gravitational field. In some situations, wave-optics phenomena (diffraction, interference) can be observed as frequency-dependent modulations of the waveform of gravitational waves (GWs). We will denote these signatures as Wave-Optics Features (WOFs) and analyze them in detail. Our framework can efficiently and accurately compute WOF in the single-image regime, of which weak lensing is a limit. The phenomenology of WOF is rich and offers valuable information: the dense cusps of individual halos appear as peaks in Green's function for lensing. If resolved, these features probe the number, effective masses, spatial distribution and inner profiles of substructures. High signal-to-noise GW signals reveal WOFs well beyond the Einstein radius, leading to a fair probability of observation by upcoming detectors such as LISA. Potential applications of WOF include reconstruction of the lens' projected density, delensing standard sirens and inferring large-scale structure morphology and the halo mass function. Because WOF are sourced by light halos with negligible baryonic content, their detection (or lack thereof) holds promise to test dark matter scenarios.

26 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter
• Use and Abuse of the Fisher Information Matrix in the Assessment of Gravitational-Wave Parameter-Estimation Prospects
• Properties of Dark Matter Haloes in Clusters, Filaments, Sheets and Voids
• Model Waveform Accuracy Standards for Gravitational Wave Data Analysis
• The imprint of massive black hole formation models on the LISA data stream
• The Population of Dark Matter Subhaloes: Mass Functions and Average Mass Loss Rates
• Reconstructing the massive black hole cosmic history through gravitational waves
• Prototype Global Analysis of LISA Data with Multiple Source Types
• Observational signatures of microlensing in gravitational waves at LIGO/Virgo frequencies
• Strong lensing of gravitational waves as seen by LISA
• Probing the nature of dark matter via gravitational waves lensed by small dark matter halos
• Exploring the hidden Universe: A novel phenomenological approach for recovering arbitrary gravitational-wave millilensing configurations
• Supermassive Black Hole Merger Rates: Uncertainties from Halo Merger Theory

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Detectability of lensed gravitational waves in matched-filtering searches
• GLoW: novel methods for wave-optics phenomena in gravitational lensing
• Coexistence Test of Primordial Black Holes and Particle Dark Matter from Diffractive Lensing
• Spin wave optics for gravitational waves lensed by a Kerr black hole
• Multi-messenger Gravitational Lensing
• Signatures of dark and baryonic structures on weakly lensed gravitational waves
• GLANCE -- Gravitational Lensing Authenticator using Non-Modelled Cross-Correlation Exploration of Gravitational Wave Signals
• Microlensing bias on the detection of strong lensing gravitational wave
• Parameter estimation of microlensed gravitational waves with Conditional Variational Autoencoders
• Effects of Galaxy Cluster Structure on Lensed Gravitational Waves
• The Born approximation in wave optics gravitational lensing revisited
• Diffraction around caustics in gravitational wave lensing
• Impact of weak lensing on bright standard siren analyses
• Gravitational wave lensing: probing Fuzzy Dark Matter with LISA
• Modulations of Gravitational Waves due to Non-static Gravitational Lenses
• Probing Binary Lens Caustics with Gravitational Waves: A Uniform Approximation Approach
• Stokes phenomena in lensing
• Constraining the environment of compact binary mergers with self-lensing signatures
• Accelerated inference of microlensed gravitational waves with machine learning
• Lensing point-spread function of coherent astrophysical sources and non-trivial wave effects
• Strong-lensing rates of massive black hole binaries in LISA
• Probing cosmic strings via gravitational-wave lensing
• Across the Universe: GW231123 as a magnified and diffracted black hole merger