Speaker
Description
The Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors are now observing large numbers of gravitational-wave signals from compact binary coalescences, with 50 entries in the latest transient catalogue GWTC-2. With this rapidly growing event rate, our chances become better to detect rare astrophysical effects on these novel cosmic messengers. One such rare effect with a long and productive history in electromagnetic astronomy and great potential for the future of GW astrophysics is gravitational lensing. This presentation covers the first LIGO-Virgo collaboration search for signatures of gravitational lensing in data from O3a, the first half of the third advanced detector observing run. We study: 1) the expected rate of lensing at current detector sensitivity and the implications of a (non-)observation of strong lensing or a stochastic gravitational-wave background on the merger-rate density at high redshift; 2) how the interpretation of individual high-mass events would change if they were found to be lensed; 3) the possibility of multiple images due to strong lensing by galaxies or galaxy clusters; and 4) possible wave-optics effects due to point-mass microlenses.
| First author | Keitel, David |
|---|---|
| david.keitel@ligo.org | |
| Collaboration / Activity | LIGO-Virgo Collaboration |
