Sky localization of complete inspiral-merger-ringdown signals for nonspinning massive black hole binaries

Abstract

We investigate the capability of LISA to measure the sky position of equal-mass, nonspinning black hole binaries, combining for the first time the entire inspiral-merger-ringdown signal, the effect of the LISA orbits, and the complete three-channel LISA response. We consider an ensemble of systems near the peak of LISA's sensitivity band, with total rest mass of 2 × 10 6 M⊙, a redshift of z = 1, and randomly chosen orientations and sky positions. We find median sky localization errors of approximately ∼ 3 arcminutes. This is comparable to the field of view of powerful electromagnetic telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, that could be used to search for electromagnetic signals associated with merging massive black holes. We investigate the way in which parameter errors decrease with measurement time, focusing specifically on the additional information provided during the merger-ringdown segment of the signal. We find that this information improves all parameter estimates directly, rather than through diminishing correlations with any subset of welldetermined parameters. Although we have employed the baseline LISA design for this study, many of our conclusions regarding the information provided by mergers will be applicable to alternative mission designs as well.PACS numbers: 04.25. 04.70.Bw, 04.80.Nn, 95.30.Sf, 95.55.Ym, 97.60.Lf

Systematic biases in parameter estimation of binary black-hole mergers

“…While acknowledging that there is currently considerable uncertainty about when and how the first space-based GW instrument will be developed, we choose to study the classic LISA configuration to make contact with the large body of work that has already been dedicated to black-hole merger parameter estimation (e.g., see Refs. [31,32,[80][81][82]). To compare with other concepts, the most relevant alteration from the classic LISA design is the arm length (e.g., from 5 Gm for classic LISA down to 1 Gm for eLISA), which sets the overall scale for parameter-estimation capabilities; our results for a more modest detector configuration would be very similar to those for classic LISA, after appropriately rescaling the total mass of the black-hole system.…”

“…These waveforms have already been used to search for GWs from highmass [27,28] and intermediate-mass [29] binary black holes in LIGO and Virgo data, and also to carry out preliminary parameter-estimation studies for ground-based detectors [30] and space-based detectors, such as classic LISA [31,32]. In this paper we shall study a set of inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms based on the Effective-One-Body (EOB) framework [33][34][35][36][37].…”

Testing General Relativity with Low-Frequency, Space-Based Gravitational-Wave Detectors

“…Later studies [322] considered the angular resolution of detectors in precessing-plane configurations like LISA's, as well as ecliptic-plane interferometers that lie flat in the ecliptic as they orbit the sun. More recent studies have considered more complete MBH-binary waveforms with spin effects, higher harmonics, and with merger and ringdown signals, and have looked at the effect of these corrections on LISA's parameter-estimation ability [455,29,442,365,33,266,307]. These papers indicate that observations with a LISA-like detector will be able to determine the masses of the two binary components to 0.01 -0.1%, the spins to 0.001 -0.1%, the sky position of the binary to 1 -10 deg 2 , and the luminosity distance to 0.1 -10%.…”

Electromagnetic chirp of a compact binary black hole: A phase template for the gravitational wave inspiral

“…Additionally, the EM chirp template should be useful in breaking parameter-degeneracies in the GW waveforms. As an example, the sky position is correlated with the orbital plane orientation; this degeneracy is broken by spin precession [49] and by higher harmonics [50], but only near the end of the inspiral, when these effects are large.…”