Submit Hee Suk2

Gravitational waves encode the properties of the source that emit them. But how, and how much? What information will gravitational waves provide to constrain the central engines of astrophysical processes (e.g., short gamma ray bursts)?

For nonexperts, our paper provides a concrete, end-to-end, and pedagogically-accessible illustration of how well existing gravitational wave detectors would do at measuring one specific source: a BH-NS binary. (Future detectors will do better, having better low-frequency sensitivity.) More important, our procedure shows that very simple approximations do a pretty good job at explaining the information gravitational waves provide.

For experts: Our paper shows that our effective Fisher matrix approximation adequately characterizes the performance of parameter estimation. Contrary to older work and in agreement with our earlier analytic study, we show that higher harmoncs provide relatively little astrophysically interesting information for typical nonprecessing BH-NS binaries. Using the output of our Markov-Chain Monte Carlo, we provide a method to quantify the number of degrees of freedom that gravitational wave measurements constrain.

For more information,

• ROS et al., Parameter Estimation of Gravitational Waves from Nonprecessing BH-NS Inspirals with higher harmonics, arxiv.org:1308.4704

• Cho et al., Gravitational waves from black hole-neutron star binaries: Effective Fisher matrices and parameter estimation using higher harmonics PRD 87 02400 (2013) : Our prior analytic work