Bounding the mass of the graviton with gravitational waves: Effect of higher harmonics in gravitational waveform templates

TL;DR

This paper investigates how including higher harmonics and amplitude corrections in gravitational wave templates improves bounds on the graviton's mass using data from advanced LIGO, Einstein Telescope, and LISA.

Contribution

It demonstrates that higher harmonics and amplitude corrections significantly enhance the bounds on the graviton's Compton wavelength in gravitational wave observations.

Findings

Bounds on graviton mass are improved by nearly an order of magnitude with higher harmonics.

Amplitude corrections further tighten the bounds across different detectors.

Higher harmonics are crucial for more accurate tests of graviton properties.

Abstract

Observations by laser interferometric detectors of gravitational waves from inspiraling compact binary systems can be used to search for a dependence of the waves' propagation speed on wavelength, and thereby to bound the mass or Compton wavelength of a putative graviton. We study the effect of including higher harmonics, as well as their post-Newtonian amplitude corrections, in the template gravitational waveforms employed in the process of parameter estimation using matched filtering. We consider the bounds that could be achieved using advanced LIGO, a proposed third generation instrument called Einstein Telescope, and the proposed space interferometer LISA. We find that in all cases, the bounds on the graviton Compton wavelength are improved by almost an order of magnitude for higher masses when amplitude corrections are included.