Calibrating systematic errors in the distance determination with the luminosity-distance space large scale structure of dark sirens and its potential applications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a statistical method to calibrate systematic errors in gravitational wave luminosity-distance measurements using large scale structure correlations, improving accuracy for cosmological applications.

Contribution

It introduces a cross-correlation technique between dark siren luminosity distances and galaxy distributions to diagnose and correct systematic biases in distance measurements.

Findings

Systematic error in luminosity distance can be constrained to about 10%.

Method can distinguish binary black hole origin scenarios.

More advanced GW experiments can achieve tighter constraints.

Abstract

The cosmological luminosity-distance can be measured from gravitational wave (GW) standard sirens, free of astronomical distance ladders and the associated systematics. However, it may still contain systematics arising from various astrophysical, cosmological and experimental sources. With the large amount of dark standard sirens of upcoming third generation GW experiments, such potential systematic bias can be diagnosed and corrected by statistical tools of the large scale structure of the universe. We estimate that, by cross-correlating the dark siren luminosity-distance space distribution and galaxy redshift space distribution, multiplicative error $m$ in the luminosity distance measurement can be constrained with $1\sigma$ uncertainty $\sigma_m\sim 0.1$. This is already able to distinguish some binary black hole origin scenarios unambiguously. Significantly better constraints and therefore more applications may be achieved by more advanced GW experiments.