Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2011-08-08
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
26 pages, 28 figures
Scientific paper
In this paper, we compute the accuracy at which the planned space-based gravitational wave detector LISA will be able to observe deviations from General Relativity. To do so, we introduce six correction parameters that account for modified gravity in the second post-Newtonian gravitational wave phase for inspiralling supermassive black hole binaries with spin precession on quasi-circular orbits. The precession of the spins and the angular momentum modulate the gravitational waveform, resulting in additional structure which could reduce correlations in the parameter space and increase the detection accuracy of the alternative theory parameters. Also, the use of higher harmonics could create further structure and increase the time during which the signal lasts in the frequency window of LISA. In order to find error distributions for the alternative theory parameters, we use the Fisher information formalism and carry out Monte Carlo simulations for 17 different binary black hole mass configurations in the range 10^5 Msun < M < 10^8 Msun with 10^3 randomly distributed points in the parameter space each, using the full (FWF) and restricted (RWF) version of the gravitational waveform. We find that the binaries can roughly be separated into two groups: one with low (\precsim 10^7 Msun) and one with high total masses (\succsim 10^7 Msun). The RWF errors on the alternative theory parameters are two orders of magnitude higher than the FWF errors for high-mass binaries while almost comparable for low-mass binaries. Due to dilution of the available information, the accuracy of the binary parameters is reduced by factors of a few, except for the luminosity distance which is affected more seriously in the high-mass regime. As an application, we compute an optimal lower bound on the graviton mass which is increased by a factor of ~1.5 when using the FWF.
Huwyler Cédric
Jetzer Philippe
Klein Antoine
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