Gravitational Wave Measurement in the Mid-Band with Atom Interferometers

Kavli Affiliate: Peter W. Graham

| First 5 Authors: Sebastian Baum, Zachary Bogorad, Peter W. Graham, ,

| Summary:

Gravitational Waves (GWs) have been detected in the $sim$100 Hz and nHz
bands, but most of the gravitational spectrum remains unobserved. A variety of
detector concepts have been proposed to expand the range of observable
frequencies. In this work, we study the capability of GW detectors in the
“mid-band”, the $sim$30 mHz — 10 Hz range between LISA and LIGO, to measure
the signals from and constrain the properties of ${sim}$1 — 100 $M_odot$
compact binaries. We focus on atom-interferometer-based detectors. We describe
a Fisher matrix code, AIMforGW, which we created to evaluate their
capabilities, and present numerical results for two benchmarks: terrestrial
km-scale detectors, and satellite-borne detectors in medium Earth orbit.
Mid-band GW detectors are particularly well-suited to pinpointing the location
of GW sources on the sky. We demonstrate that a satellite-borne detector could
achieve sub-degree sky localization for any detectable source with chirp mass
$mathcal{M}_c lesssim 50 M_odot$. We also compare different detector
configurations, including different locations of terrestrial detectors and
various choices of the orbit of a satellite-borne detector. As we show, a
network of only two terrestrial single-baseline detectors or one
single-baseline satellite-borne detector would each provide close-to-uniform
sky-coverage, with signal-to-noise ratios varying by less than a factor of two
across the entire sky. We hope that this work contributes to the efforts of the
GW community to assess the merits of different detector proposals.

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