Prospects for Detecting Gravitational Waves at 5 Hz with Ground-Based Detectors
We propose an upgrade to Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), named LIGO-LF, that focuses on improving the sensitivity in the 5–30 Hz low-frequency band, and we explore the upgrade’s astrophysical applications. We present a comprehensive study of the detector’s technical noises and show that with technologies cur...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
American Physical Society
2018
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114636 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6011-6190 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2700-0767 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8459-4499 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4147-2560 |
| Summary: | We propose an upgrade to Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), named LIGO-LF, that focuses on improving the sensitivity in the 5–30 Hz low-frequency band, and we explore the upgrade’s astrophysical applications. We present a comprehensive study of the detector’s technical noises and show that with technologies currently under development, such as interferometrically sensed seismometers and balanced-homodyne readout, LIGO-LF can reach the fundamental limits set by quantum and thermal noises down to 5 Hz. These technologies are also directly applicable to the future generation of detectors. We go on to consider this upgrade’s implications for the astrophysical output of an aLIGO-like detector. A single LIGO-LF can detect mergers of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) out to a redshift of z≃6 and would be sensitive to intermediate-mass black holes up to 2000 M_{⊙}. The detection rate of merging BHs will increase by a factor of 18 compared to aLIGO. Additionally, for a given source the chirp mass and total mass can be constrained 2 times better than aLIGO and the effective spin 3–5 times better than aLIGO. Furthermore, LIGO-LF enables the localization of coalescing binary neutron stars with an uncertainty solid angle 10 times smaller than that of aLIGO at 30 Hz and 4 times smaller when the entire signal is used. LIGO-LF also significantly enhances the probability of detecting other astrophysical phenomena including the tidal excitation of neutron star r modes and the gravitational memory effects. |
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