Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2009 APS April Meeting
Volume 54, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, May 2–5, 2009; Denver, Colorado
Session H11: LISA |
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Sponsoring Units: GGR DAP Chair: Guido Mueller, University of Florida Room: Plaza Court 1 |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 10:45AM - 10:57AM |
H11.00001: The status, achievements, and prospects of the Mock LISA Data Challenges Michele Vallisneri For the last three years, many gravitational-wave analysts around the world have supported the Mock LISA Data Challenges (MLDCs), a program to demonstrate and encourage the development of LISA data-analysis capabilities, tools and techniques. In the MLDCs, a task force chartered by the LIST periodically issues challenge data sets containing GW signals from sources of undisclosed parameters, embedded in synthetic LISA noise. Challenge participants have a few months to analyze the data and submit detection candidates, which are then compared with the sources originally injected in the data sets. In this talk, I review the milestones achieved in the first three MLDCs, and I describe Challenge 3 (for which, at the time of this meeting, we will have just received participant entries). I discuss how future challenge problems may broaden in scope from the technical analysis of LISA data to the investigation of LISA's science objectives, and to a systematic characterization of the instrument effects that will affect data analysis. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 10:57AM - 11:09AM |
H11.00002: ABSTRACT WITHDRAWN |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:09AM - 11:21AM |
H11.00003: Massive Black Hole Mergers: Can we see what LISA will hear? Joan Centrella, Cole Miller, Chris Reynolds, James van Meter, John Wise, John Baker, Darian Boggs, Bernard Kelly, Sean McWilliams Coalescing massive black hole binaries are formed when galaxies merge. The final stages of this coalescence produce strong gravitational wave signals that can be detected by the space-borne LISA. When the black holes merge in the presence of gas and magnetic fields, various types of electromagnetic signals may also be produced. Modeling such electromagnetic counterparts requires evolving the behavior of both gas and fields in the strong-field regions around the black holes. We have taken a first step towards this problem by mapping the flow of pressureless matter in the dynamic, 3-D general relativistic spacetime around the merging black holes. We report on the results of these initial simulations and discuss their likely importance for future hydrodynamical simulations. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:21AM - 11:33AM |
H11.00004: Observing Merging Massive Black Hole Binaries with LISA James Thorpe, Sean McWilliams, John Baker, Keith Arnaud The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is expected to detect gravitational radiation from the inspiral and merger of massive black hole binaries at high redshifts with large signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Observing these waveforms with large SNRs will allow physical parameters such as hole masses and spins, luminosity distance, and sky position to be measured. Two important questions are the ultimate precision of these measurements and the manner in which the precision increases with observation time. These qualities will affect LISA's impact as an individual instrument as well as its potential for synergy with other instruments. We present estimates of LISA parameter errors for the special case of non-spinning black holes with an emphasis on the contribution of the late inspiral and merger portions of the waveform. This regime has only recently become accessible due to the success of numerical relativity in providing a precise description of the merger waveform. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:33AM - 11:45AM |
H11.00005: Applying numerical simulation results to LISA John Baker, Bernard Kelly, Sean McWilliams, James Thorpe Binary black hole systems are key observational targets of both ground- and space-based gravitational wave observatories. Interpretation of these observations depends on a detailed understanding of the gravitational radiation waveforms predicted by General Relativity. Advances in numerical relativity are leading to an increasingly rich understanding of the strong radiation generated in the final moments of these mergers. This knowledge can now be applied to answer questions of gravitational wave data analysis. Using the Effective-One-Body formalism together with ideas from an implicit rotating source characterization of numerical relativity waveforms, we construct a parameterized analytic waveform model representing the complete gravitational wavetrain. Then using standard data analysis techniques we apply this model toward an improved understanding of how well the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be able to measure the astrophysical parameters of massive black hole mergers. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:45AM - 11:57AM |
H11.00006: Detection templates for extreme mass ratio inspirals: Is the radiative approximation sufficient? Eanna Flanagan, Tanja Hinderer Gravitational waveform templates for generic extreme mass ratio inspirals, in the radiative approximation, are now nearly in hand. There has been some debate about whether such templates will suffice for signal detection. We describe computations of templates for general equatorial inspirals of a compact object into a Schwarzschild black hole, using as a toy model the geodesic equations supplemented with self-force terms taken from the Kidder-Will-Wiseman hybrid equations of motion. We compute the maximum phase error incurred by the omission of conservative self force terms during the last year of inspiral, as a function of initial eccentricity and of the binaries masses, including optimizing over initial conditions, extending earlier work of Pound and Poisson. The phase errors are less than three cycles in all cases. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the radiative approximation will be sufficient for detection templates, for reasons which we describe. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 11:57AM - 12:09PM |
H11.00007: Observational limitations of black hole perturbation theory Steve Drasco, Curt Cutler, Michele Vallisneri Some of the black hole binary systems targeted by gravitational wave detectors will be sought using templates based on black hole perturbation theory. Currently, the most theoretically advanced templates available for such searches assume an adiabatic system described only to leading order in the mass ratio. We study the impact of these theoretical limitations on our ability to measure system parameters such as black hole masses and spins. Specifically, we compute the systematic errors induced by varying the ability of kludged waveform families to reproduce the waveforms of black hole perturbation theory. Our work represents the first use of a frequency-domain implementation of numerically kludged waveforms [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 12:09PM - 12:21PM |
H11.00008: Black hole quasinormal mode spectroscopy with LISA Manish M. Jadhav, Lior M. Burko The signal--to--noise ratio (SNR) for black hole quasinormal mode sources of low--frequency gravitational waves is estimated using a Monte Carlo approach that replaces currently available methods that use all--sky averaging approximations and parameter fixing. We consider an eleven dimensional parameter space that includes both source and detector parameters. For the black-hole spin dependent radiation efficiency, $\epsilon_{\rm rd}$, we use recent numerical relativity results. We find that in the black--hole mass range $M\sim 4$--$10\times 10^6M_{\odot}$ the SNR is significantly higher than the SNR for the all--sky average case, as a result of the variation of the spin parameter of the sources. This increased SNR may translate to a higher event rate for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). We also study the directional dependence of the SNR, and show at which directions in the sky LISA will have greater response. We also identify the LISA ``blind spots" for this type of sources. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, May 3, 2009 12:21PM - 12:33PM |
H11.00009: sdB binaries as gravitational-wave sources for LISA Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Richard Wade We discuss binary systems containing hot subluminous dwarf B (sdB) stars as gravitational-wave (GW) sources for the proposed space-based detector LISA. ``sdB'' stars are core-helium burning systems with masses near 0.5 Msun, covered with thin hydrogen envelopes. They lie at the extreme blue end of the horizontal branch of the H-R diagram. They directly evolve to the white dwarf (WD) cooling sequence, avoiding the asymptotic giant branch. Observational evidence in some sdB binaries points to a WD or NS/BH companion, indicating that the short period systems could be potential low frequency ($10^{-4}$ - $1$ Hz) GW sources. Here, we first discuss different scenarios of forming sdB binaries, including the formation of a sdB+sdB system that can probably live long enough to be observable as a GW source. We also estimate the fraction of sdB+companion binaries that are detectable by LISA in our Galaxy, compared to a similar population of double-WD binaries. [Preview Abstract] |
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