Impacts of overlapping gravitational-wave signals on the parameter estimation: Toward the search for cosmological backgrounds

TL;DR

This paper assesses how overlapping gravitational-wave signals from future detectors could affect parameter estimation, finding that such overlaps are rare and generally do not cause significant biases unless the signals are extremely similar in timing and mass.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed estimate of the occurrence rate and impact of overlapping GW signals on parameter estimation for third-generation detectors.

Findings

Overlapping events occur about 200 per day for BNSs and a few per hour for BBHs.

Most overlaps do not cause large errors or biases in parameter estimation.

Very closely overlapping signals are extremely rare, less than once per year.

Abstract

Third-generation gravitational wave detectors, such as the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, will detect a bunch of gravitational-wave (GW) signals originating from the coalescence of binary neutron star (BNS) and binary black hole (BBH) systems out to the higher redshifts, $z\sim 5-10$. There is a potential concern that some of the GW signals detected at a high statistical significance eventually overlap with each other, and the parameter estimation of such an overlapping system can differ from the one expected from a single event. Also, there are certainly overlapping systems in which one of the overlapping events has a low signal-to-noise ratio $\lesssim 4$, and is thus unable to be clearly detected. Those system will potentially be misidentified with a single GW event, and the estimated parameters of binary GWs can be biased. We estimate the occurrence rate of those overlapping events. We find that the numbers of overlapping events are $\sim 200$ per day for BNSs and a few per hour for BBHs. Then we study the statistical impacts of these overlapping GWs on a parameter estimation based on the Fisher matrix analysis. Our finding is that the overlapping signals produce neither large statistical errors nor serious systematic biases on the parameters of binary systems, unless the coalescence time and the redshifted chirp masses of the two overlapping GWs are very close to each other, i.e., $|\mathcal{M}_{z1}-\mathcal{M}_{z2}|\lesssim10^{-4} \,(10^{-1})\,M_\odot$ and $|t_{\rm c1}-t_{\rm c2}|\lesssim10^{-2}\,(10^{-1})$\,s for BNSs (BBHs). The occurrence rate of such a closely overlapping event is shown to be much smaller than one per year with the third-generation detectors.