Astrophysical systematics on testing general relativity with gravitational waves from galactic double white dwarfs

TL;DR

This paper assesses how astrophysical effects impact the ability of LISA-detected galactic double white dwarfs to test general relativity, emphasizing the importance of accounting for these effects in gravitational wave analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of astrophysical effects on gravitational wave signals from double white dwarfs and their impact on testing gravity beyond general relativity.

Findings

Astrophysical effects can dominate measurement uncertainties in gravity tests.

Tidal and magnetic effects are significant for large magnetic fields (>10^7 G).

Ignoring astrophysical effects can lead to biased parameter estimation.

Abstract

Gravitational waves have been shown to provide new constraints on gravitational theories beyond general relativity (GR), especially in the strong field regime. Gravitational wave signals from galactic double white dwarfs, expected to be detected by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), also have the potential to place stringent bounds on certain theories that give rise to relatively large deviations from GR in less compact binaries, such as through scalar radiation. Nevertheless, the orbital evolution of close double white dwarf systems is also affected by various astrophysical effects, such as stellar rotation, tidal interactions, and magnetic interactions, which add complexity to the gravity tests. In this work, we employ the parametrized post-Einsteinian model to capture the leading beyond-GR effect on the signal and estimate the measurement uncertainties using the Fisher information matrix. We then study the systematic error caused by ignoring each astrophysical effect mentioned above on the parameter estimation. Our numerical results show that, to place bounds on the non-GR effects comparable to existing bounds from pulsar observations, tight priors on the mass of the binary and long observation time are required. At this level of sensitivity, we found that systematic errors from the astrophysical effects dominate statistical errors. The most significant effects investigated here are torques from tidal synchronization and magnetic unipolar induction for sufficiently large magnetic fields ($>10^7$G). Meanwhile, even the weaker astrophysical effects from quadrupolar deformations are of a similar order of magnitude as the statistical uncertainty, and hence cannot be ignored in the waveform model. We conclude that the astrophysical effects must be carefully accounted for in the parameter estimation to test gravity with galactic double white dwarfs detected by LISA.