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 we use to evaluate their capabilities, and present numerical
results for two benchmarks: terrestrial km-scale detectors, and satellite-borne
detectors in medium Earth orbit. One unique capability of mid-band GW detectors
is 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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