Constraining parameters of coalescing stellar mass binary black hole systems with the Einstein Telescope alone

TL;DR

The Einstein Telescope alone can effectively detect and analyze stellar mass binary black hole mergers, constraining their properties and breaking degeneracies, thus enabling population studies without the need for a network of detectors.

Contribution

This paper demonstrates that the Einstein Telescope can independently constrain the redshift and chirp mass of binary black hole mergers, providing comparable accuracy to detector networks.

Findings

ET can weakly constrain source sky location.

ET estimates redshift and chirp mass with high accuracy.

ET can break redshift-chirp mass degeneracy.

Abstract

The Einstein Telescope (ET) is the future third generation gravitational wave detector consisting of three independent interferometers arranged in a triangular configuration, with the sensitivity large enough to be able to detect stellar mass black holes even beyond the redshift of 10. In this paper, we analyze the capabilities of ET as a standalone instrument and not part of a network. We show that the analysis of detection of binary coalescences in the three individual interferometers of the ET allow us to weakly constrain the sky location of the source. We present the analysis that leads to the constraints on the redshift and source frame chirp mass of detected binaries. We show that these values can be estimated with the accuracy comparable to the one expected from networks of gravitational wave interferometers. Thus, we show that the ET as a single instrument is able to break the redshift - chirp mass degeneracy and is therefore a valuable tool to explore properties of populations of merging compact object binaries.