Calibrating systematic errors in the distance determination with the luminosity-distance space large scale structure of dark sirens and its potential applications

Abstract

The cosmological luminosity-distance can be measured from gravitational wave (GW) standard sirens, free of astronomical distance ladders and the associated systematics. However, it may still contain systematics arising from various astrophysical, cosmological and experimental sources. With the large amount of dark standard sirens of upcoming third generation GW experiments, such potential systematic bias can be diagnosed and corrected by statistical tools of the large scale structure of the universe. We estimate that, by cross-correlating the dark siren luminosity-distance space distribution and galaxy redshift space distribution, multiplicative error m in the luminosity distance measurement can be constrained with 1σ uncertainty σ m ∼ 0.1. This is already able to distinguish some binary black hole origin scenarios unambiguously. Significantly better constraints and therefore more applications may be achieved by more advanced GW experiments.