Effects of finite armlength of LISA on analysis of gravitational waves from MBH binaries.pdfVIP

Effects of finite arm-length of LISA on analysis of gravitational waves from MBH binaries Naoki Seto Department of Earth and Space Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka 560-0043, Japan Response of an interferometer becomes complicated for gravitational wave shorter than the arm-length of the detector, as nature of wave appears strongly. We have studied how parameter estimation for merging massive black hole binaries are affected by this complicated effect in the case of LISA. It is shown that three dimensional positions of some binaries might be determined much better than the past estimations that use the long wave approximation. For equal mass binaries 5 this improvement is most prominent at ∼ 10 M⊙ . I. INTRODUCTION 2 0 The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a joint project of NASA and ESA, is planed to be launched 0 in 2011 [1]. LISA is sensitive to low frequency gravitational waves at 10−4Hz f 10−1Hz, and would directly 2 ∼ ∼ confirm gravitational radiation from some known Galactic binaries [2]. Thousands of closed white dwarf binaries t c would be also detected by LISA. They can be regarded as insurances of the project, but other exciting phenomena O might be observed [2]. Coalescence of a massive black hole (MBH) binary is the most spectacular and energ