Résumé / Abstract Journal-club_GReCO

Séminaire / Seminar GReCO

« Higher harmonics increase LISA''s mass reach for supermassive black holes »

B. R. Iyer
Raman Research Inst. (RRI) (Bangalore, Inde)

Current expectations on the signal to noise ratios and masses of supermassive black holes which the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) can observe are based on using in matched filtering only the dominant harmonic of the inspiral waveform at twice the orbital frequency. Other harmonics will affect the signal-to-noise ratio of systems currently believed to be observable by LISA. More significantly, inclusion of other harmonics in our matched filters would mean that more massive systems that were previously thought to be not visible in LISA should be detectable with reasonable SNRs.
Our estimates show that we should be able to significantly increase the mass reach of LISA and observe the more commonly occurring supermassive black holes of masses ~10^8 Mo. This is important from the astrophysical viewpoint since observational evidence for the existence of black holes in this mass range is quite strong and binaries containing such supermassive black holes will be inaccessible to LISA if one uses as detection templates only the dominant harmonic.
jeudi 3 mai 2007 - 11:00
Salle des séminaires Évry Schatzman
Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
Pages web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage