We consider the propagation of gravitational waves in the late time Universe with the presence of structure. Before detection, gravitational waves emitted from distant sources have to traverse through regions of spacetime which are far from smooth and homogeneous. We investigate the effect of inhomogeneities on the observables associated with the gravitational wave sources. In particular, we evaluate the impact of inhomogeneities on gravitational wave propagation by employing Buchert's framework of averaging. In context of a toy model within the above framework, it is first shown how the redshift versus distance relation gets affected through the averaging process. We then study the variation of the redshift dependent part of the observed gravitational wave amplitude for different combination of our model parameters. We show that the variation of the gravitational wave amplitude with respect to redshift can deviate significantly compared to that in the $Λ$CDM-model. Our result signifies the importance of local inhomogeneities on precision measurements of parameters of gravitational wave sources.
It has been recently shown that quadruply lensed gravitational-wave (GW) events due to coalescing binaries can be localized to one or just a few galaxies, even in the absence of an electromagnetic counterpart. We discuss how this can be used to extract information on modified GW propagation, which is a crucial signature of modifications of gravity at cosmological scales. We show that, using quadruply lensed systems, it is possible to constrain the parameter $Ξ_0$ that characterizes modified GW propagation, without the need of imposing a prior on $H_0$. A LIGO/Virgo/Kagra network at target sens…
Modified gravitational wave propagation is a smoking gun of modifications of gravity at cosmological scales, and can be the most promising observable for testing such theories. The observation of gravitational waves (GW) in recent years has allowed us to start probing this effect, and here we briefly review two promising ways of testing it. We will show that, already with the current network of detectors, it is possible to reach an interesting accuracy in the estimation of the $Ξ_0$ parameter (that characterizes modified gravitational wave propagation, with $Ξ_{0, {\rm GR}} = 1$) and with next…
The first discovery of the gravitational wave (GW) event, GW150914, suggests a higher merger rate of black-hole (BH) binaries. If this is true, a number of BH binaries will be observed via the second-generation GW detectors, and the statistical properties of the observed BH binaries can be scrutinized. A naive but important question to ask is whether the spatial distribution of BH binaries faithfully traces the matter inhomogeneities in the Universe or not. Although the BH binaries are thought to be formed inside the galaxies in most of the scenarios, there is no observational evidence to conf…
Inhomogeneous Cosmologies with Bumpy Structure from Superfluid Pionic Vortices and the propagation of electromagnetic field
Centro de Estudios Científicos (CECs)（科学研究中心）；Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad San Sebastián（塞巴斯蒂安大学工程学院）；Instituto de Ciencias Fisicas y Matemáticas, Universidad Austral de Chile（智利南方大学物理与数学科学学院）；Departamento de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad de La Frontera（弗雷兰特大学物理系）；Institute of Systems Science, Durban University of Technology（德班理工大学系统科学研究所）；Centro de Investigación, Innovación y Creación (CIIC), Universidad Católica de Temuco（特木科天主教大学创新与研究中心）；Departamento de Ciencias Matemáticas y Físicas, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Católica de Temuco（特木科天主教大学工程学院数学与物理系）；National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS)（理论与计算科学国家研究所）
Black holes binaries coming from a distribution of primordial black holes might exhibit a large merger rate up to large redshifts. Using a phenomenological model for the merger rate, we show that changes in its slope, up to redshifts $z\sim 4$, are constrained by current limits on the amplitude of the stochastic gravitational wave background from LIGO/Virgo O3 run. This shows that the stochastic background constrains the merger rate for redshifts larger than the single event horizon of detection ($z\simeq 1$ for the same detector). Moreover, we show that for steep merger rates the shape of the…
In testing gravity a model-independent way, one of crucial tests is measuring the propagation speed of a gravitational wave (GW). In general relativity, a GW propagates with the speed of light, while in the alternative theories of gravity the propagation speed could deviate from the speed of light due to the modification of gravity or spacetime structure at a quantum level. Previously we proposed the method measuring the GW speed by directly comparing the arrival times between a GW and a photon from the binary merger of neutron stars or neutron star and black hole, assuming that it is associat…
We analyze two different algorithms for constructing weakly inhomogeneous models for the low-redshift Universe, in order to provide a tool for testing the geodesic dynamics, within the sphere of validity for the Universe acceleration. We first implement the so-called quasi-isotropic solution in the late Universe, when a pure dark energy equation of state for the cosmological perfect fluid is considered. We demonstrate, that a solution exists only if the physical scale of the inhomogeneities is larger then the Hubble scale of the microphysics, which implies that inhomogeneities could not be obs…
We study effects of inhomogeneities on distance measures in an exact relativistic Swiss-cheese model of the universe, focusing on the distance modulus. The model has LCDM background dynamics, and the `holes' are non-symmetric structures described by the Szekeres metric. The Szekeres exact solution of Einstein's equations, which is inhomogeneous and anisotropic, allows us to capture potentially relevant effects on light propagation due to nontrivial evolution of structures in an exact framework. Light beams traversing a single Szekeres structure in different ways can experience either magnifica…
Recent work has shown that modified gravitational wave (GW) propagation can be a powerful probe of dark energy and modified gravity, specific to GW observations. We use the technique of Gaussian processes, that allows the reconstruction of a function from the data without assuming any parametrization, to measurements of the GW luminosity distance from simulated joint GW-GRB detections, combined with measurements of the electromagnetic luminosity distance by simulated DES data. For the GW events we consider both a second-generation LIGO/Virgo/Kagra (HVLKI) network, and a third-generation detect…
Modified gravitational wave (GW) propagation is a generic phenomenon in modified gravity. It affects the reconstruction of the redshift of coalescing binaries from the luminosity distance measured by GW detectors, and therefore the reconstruction of the actual masses of the component compact stars from the observed (`detector-frame') masses. We show that, thanks to the narrowness of the mass distribution of binary neutron stars, this effect can provide a clear signature of modified gravity, particularly for the redshifts explored by third generation GW detectors such as Einstein Telescope and …
We develop a discrete model to account for the effects of inhomogeneities on the redshift of photons. Using this model we compute the probability distribution of the observed redshift respect to the background value, obtaining that its dispersion around the central value is proportional the square root of the comoving distance. This implies that data analysis should include a contribution to the total error budget which depends on the distance of the source. Assuming large scale inhomogeneities with a power spectrum given by primordial curvature perturbations the effect is expected to be small…
The regularization and renormalization of the radiative mass-type quadrupole moment of inspiralling compact binaries (without spins) is investigated at the fourth post-Newtonian (4PN) approximation of general relativity. As clear from the conservative 4PN equations of motion, a dimensional regularization has to be implemented in order to properly treat the non-linear interactions experienced by gravitational waves during their propagation toward future null infinity. By implementing such procedure, we show that the poles coming from the source moment (computed in a companion paper) are exactly…
The interpretation of cosmological observations relies on a notion of an average Universe, which is usually considered as the homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model. However, inhomogeneities may statistically bias the observational averages with respect to FLRW, notably for distance measurements, due to a number of effects such as gravitational lensing and redshift perturbations. In this article, we review the main known theoretical results on average distance measures in cosmology, based on second-order perturbation theory, and we fill in some of their gaps…
As a crucial step towards the completion of the fourth post-Newtonian (4PN) gravitational-wave generation from compact binary systems, we obtain the expressions of the so-called "canonical" multipole moments of the source in terms of the "source" and "gauge" moments. The canonical moments describe the propagation of gravitational waves outside the source's near zone, while the source and gauge moments encode explicit information about the matter source. Those two descriptions, in terms of two sets of canonical moments or in terms of six sets of source and gauge moments, are isometric. We thus …
The future gravitational wave (GW) observations of compact binaries and their possible electromagnetic counterparts may be used to probe the nature of the extra dimension. It is widely accepted that gravitons and photons are the only two completely confirmed objects that can travel along null geodesics in our four-dimensional space-time. However, if there exist extra dimensions and only GWs can propagate freely in the bulk, the causal propagations of GWs and electromagnetic waves (EMWs) are in general different. In this paper, we study null geodesics of GWs and EMWs in a five-dimensional anti-…
Coalescence of binary neutron stars (BNSs) is one of the sources of gravitational waves (GWs) able to be detected by ground-based interferometric detectors. The event GW170817 was the first observed in the gravitational and electromagnetic spectra, showing through this joint analysis a certain compatibility with the models of short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) to explain the signature of this system. Due to the intense magnetic fields of the neutron stars, the plasma magnetosphere stays strongly magnetized and the propagation of the GW through plasma can excite magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes such…
We study the cosmological propagation of gravitational waves (GWs) beyond general relativity (GR) across homogeneous and isotropic backgrounds. We consider scenarios in which GWs interact with an additional tensor field and use a parametrized phenomenological approach that generically describes their coupled equations of motion. We analyze four distinct classes of derivative and non-derivative interactions: mass, friction, velocity, and chiral. We apply the WKB formalism to account for the cosmological evolution and obtain analytical solutions to these equations. We corroborate these results b…
Is gravity parity violating? Given the recent observations of gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries, we develop a strategy to find an answer with current and future detectors. We identify the key signatures of parity violation in gravitational waves: amplitude birefringence in their propagation and a modified chirping rate in their generation. We then determine the optimal binaries to test the existence of parity violation in gravity, and prioritize the research in modeling that will be required to carry out such tests before detectors reach their design sensitivity.
We study gravitational waves emitted by a binary system of non-spinning bodies in a quasi-circular inspiral within the framework of Einstein-aether theory. In particular, we compute explicitly and analytically the expressions for the time-domain and frequency-domain waveforms, gravitational wave polarizations, and response functions for both ground- and space-based detectors in the post-Newtonian approximation. We find that, when going beyond leading-order in the post-Newtonian approximation, the non-Einsteinian polarization modes contain terms that depend on both the first and the second harm…
The advent of gravitational wave astronomy provides new proving grounds for testing theories of gravity. Recent work has reinvigorated the study of bimetric theories of gravity and massive gravity theories. One of the most interesting predictions of these theories, as well as some string theories, is the subluminal speed of propagating gravitational waves. Multi-messenger astronomy provides a unique opportunity to put limits on the difference (either positive or negative) between the propagation speed of electromagnetic and gravitational waves from these sources. This paper considers limits fr…
