Detector induced anisotropies on the angular distribution of gravitational wave sources and opportunities of constraining horizon scale anisotropies

Abstract

The cosmological principle has been verified using electromagnetic (EM) observations. However its verification with high accuracy is challenging due to various foregrounds and selection effects, and possible violation of the cosmological principle has been reported in the literature. In contrast, gravitational wave (GW) observations are free of these foregrounds and related selection biases. This may enable future GW experiments to test the cosmological principle robustly with full sky distribution of millions of standard bright/dark sirens. However, the sensitivities of GW detectors are highly anisotropic, resulting in significant instrument induced anisotropies in the observed GW catalog. We investigate these instrumental effects for 3rd generation detector networks in term of multipoles aℓm of the observed GW source distribution, using Monte Carlo simulations. (1) We find that the instrument induced anisotropy primarily exists at the m = 0 modes on large scales (ℓ ≲ 10), with amplitude 〈|aℓ0|2〉 ∼ 10−3 for two detectors (ET-CE) and ∼10−4 for three detectors (ET-2CE). This anisotropy is correlated with the sky distribution of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and localization accuracy. Such anisotropy sets a lower limit on the detectable cosmological aℓ0. (2) However, we find that the instrument induced anisotropy is efficiently canceled by rotation of the Earth in m ≠ 0 components of aℓm. Therefore aℓm (m ≠ 0) are clean windows to detect cosmological anisotropies. (3) We investigate the capability of 3rd generation GW experiments to measure the cosmic dipole. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we find that cosmic dipole with an amplitude of ∼10−2 reported in the literature can be detected/ruled out by ET-CE and ET-2CE robustly, through the measurement of a11.