Gravitomagnetism and gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper reviews gravitomagnetism and the magnetic components of gravitational waves, emphasizing their significance in high-frequency interferometer signals and the potential loss of observable data if neglected.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of magnetic components of GWs in both General Relativity and Scalar Tensor Gravity, highlighting their importance in GW detection.

Findings

Magnetic components of GWs are crucial at high frequencies.

Neglecting magnetic effects can lead to a 15% loss in observable signals.

Magnetic components vary between different theories of gravity.

Abstract

After extensively reviewing general relativistic gravitomagnetism, both historically and phenomenologically, we review in detail the so-called magnetic components of gravitational waves (GWs), which have to be taken into account in the context of the total response functions of interferometers for GWs propagating from arbitrary directions. Following the more recent approaches of this important issue, the analysis of such magnetic components will be reviewed in both of standard General Theory of Relativity (GTR) and Scalar Tensor Gravity. Thus, we show in detail that such a magnetic component becomes particularly important in the high-frequency portion of the range of ground based interferometers for GWs which arises from the two different theories of gravity. Our reviewed results show that if one neglects the magnetic contribution to the gravitational field of a GW, approximately 15% of the potential observable signal could, in principle, be lost.