GRAVITATIONAL LENS AMPLIFICATION OF GRAVITATIONAL RADIATION

Abstract

In a recent paper by Wang, Turner and Stebbins (1996) an influence of gravitational lensing on increasing an estimated rate of gravitational radiation sources was considered. We show that the authors used the geometrical optics approximation model for gravitational lensing and thus they gave overestimated rate of possible events for possible sources of gravitational radiation for the advanced LIGO detector. We show also that if we would use a more correct model of gravitational lensing, one could conclude that more strong influence on increasing rate of estimated events of gravitational radiation for advanced LIGO detector could give gravitational lenses of galactic masses but not gravitational lenses of stellar masses as Wang et al. concluced. Moreover, binary gravitational lenses could give essential distortion of gravitational wave form template, especially gravitational wave template of periodic sources and the effect could be significant for templates of quasi-periodic sources which could be detected by a future gravitational wave space detector like LISA.