Pith. sign in

Beyond the Detector Horizon: Forecasting Gravitational-Wave Strong Lensing

5 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 1 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.

5 Pith papers citing it
1 external citations · OpenAlex
abstract

When gravitational waves pass near massive astrophysical objects, they can be gravitationally lensed. The lensing can split them into multiple wave-fronts, magnify them, or imprint beating patterns on the waves. Here we focus on the multiple images produced by strong lensing. In particular, we investigate strong lensing forecasts, the rate of lensing, and the role of lensing statistics in strong lensing searches. Overall, we find a reasonable rate of lensed detections for double, triple, and quadruple images at the LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA design sensitivity. We also report the rates for A+ and LIGO Voyager and briefly comment on potential improvements due to the inclusion of sub-threshold triggers. We find that most galaxy-lensed events originate from redshifts $z \sim 1-4$ and report the expected distribution of lensing parameters for the observed events. Besides forecasts, we investigate the role of lensing forecasts in strong lensing searches, which explore repeated event pairs. One problem associated with the searches is the rising number of event pairs, which leads to a rapidly increasing false alarm probability. We show how knowledge of the expected galaxy lensing time delays in our searches allow us to tackle this problem. Once the time delays are included, the false alarm probability increases linearly (similar to non-lensed searches) instead of quadratically with time, significantly improving the search. For galaxy cluster lenses, the improvement is less significant. The main uncertainty associated with these forecasts are the merger-rate density estimates at high redshift, which may be better resolved in the future.

citation-role summary

background 1

citation-polarity summary

years

2026 4 2025 1

roles

background 1

polarities

background 1

representative citing papers

Wave-optics gravitational wave lensing in modified gravity

gr-qc · 2026-05-20 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0

In a curvature-coupled propagation framework for modified gravity, gravitational-wave lensing in wave optics shows persistent infrared interactions that prevent the amplification factor from approaching unity at zero frequency, requiring an interacting Green function and partial-wave treatment.

The Science of the Einstein Telescope

gr-qc · 2025-03-15 · unverdicted · novelty 3.0

The paper provides state-of-the-art predictions for the Einstein Telescope's impact on fundamental physics, cosmology, compact-object astrophysics, and multi-messenger astronomy across its proposed configurations.

citing papers explorer

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.