Author:
Baum Sebastian,Bogorad Zachary,Graham Peter W.
Abstract
Abstract
Gravitational Waves (GWs) have been detected in the ∼ 100 Hz and nHz bands, but most of the gravitational spectrum remains unobserved. A variety of detector concepts have been proposed to expand the range of observable frequencies. In this work, we study the capability of GW detectors in the “mid-band”, the ∼ 30 mHz– 10 Hz range between LISA and LIGO, to measure the signals from and constrain the properties of ∼ 1 – 100 M
⊙ compact binaries. We focus on atom-interferometer-based detectors. We describe a Fisher matrix code, AIMforGW, which we created to evaluate their capabilities, and present numerical results for two benchmarks: terrestrial km-scale detectors, and satellite-borne detectors in medium Earth orbit. Mid-band GW detectors are particularly well-suited to pinpointing the location of GW sources on the sky. We demonstrate that a satellite-borne detector could achieve sub-degree sky localization for any detectable source with chirp mass ℳ
c
≲ 50 M
⊙. We also compare different detector configurations, including different locations of terrestrial detectors and various choices of the orbit of a satellite-borne detector. As we show, a network of only two terrestrial single-baseline detectors or one single-baseline satellite-borne detector would each provide close-to-uniform sky-coverage, with signal-to-noise ratios varying by less than a factor of two across the entire sky. We hope that this work contributes to the efforts of the GW community to assess the merits of different detector proposals.
Reference153 articles.
1. Properties of the Binary Black Hole Merger GW150914;LIGO Scientific, Virgo Collaboration;Phys. Rev. Lett.,2016
2. GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs;LIGO Scientific, Virgo Collaboration;Phys. Rev. X,2019
3. GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run;LIGO Scientific, Virgo Collaboration;Phys. Rev. X,2021
4. GWTC-2.1: Deep extended catalog of compact binary coalescences observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first half of the third observing run;LIGO Scientific, VIRGO Collaboration;Phys. Rev. D,2024
5. GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the Second Part of the Third Observing Run;KAGRA, VIRGO, LIGO Scientific Collaboration;Phys. Rev. X,2023