Including higher harmonics in gravitational-wave parameter estimation and cosmological implications for LISA

TL;DR

Including higher harmonics in gravitational-wave analysis significantly improves parameter estimation accuracy for massive black hole binaries, aiding in cosmological measurements and dark siren identification with LISA.

Contribution

This study demonstrates that incorporating higher harmonics, especially the (3,3) mode, greatly enhances LISA's ability to localize sources and identify host galaxies, which was not thoroughly explored before.

Findings

10^3 times better angular resolution with higher harmonics

10^4 times better luminosity distance estimation

Over 70% host galaxy identification probability with higher modes

Abstract

Massive black holes (MBHs) are crucial in shaping their host galaxies. How the MBH co-evolves with its host galaxy is a pressing problem in astrophysics and cosmology. The valuable information carried by the binary MBH is encoded in the gravitational waves (GWs), which will be detectable by the space-borne GW detector LISA. In the GW data analysis, usually, only the dominant $(2,2)$ mode of the GW signal is considered in the parameter estimation for LISA. However, including the higher harmonics in parameter estimation can break the degeneracy between the parameters, especially for the inclination angle and luminosity distance. This may enable the identification of GW signals without electromagnetic counterparts, known as ''dark sirens''. Thus, incorporating higher harmonics will be beneficial to resolve the Hubble tension and constrain the cosmological model. In this paper, we investigate the role of higher harmonics in the parameter estimation for GWs emitted by binary MBHs. We demonstrate that including $(3,3)$ mode can lead to a $10^3$-times improvement in angular resolution and a $10^4$-times improvement in luminosity distance. Meanwhile, our results indicate that considering higher harmonics increases the probability of identifying over 70% host galaxies from $10^{-2}\,\rm{Gpc}^3$ cosmological volume threshold (corresponding $10^5$ host galaxies), while the probability less than 8% for only the $(2,2)$ mode. Thus, our results underscore the importance of including higher modes in the GW signal from binary MBHs, for LISA at least $(3,3)$ mode.