Effects of finite arm-length of LISA on analysis of gravitational waves from MBH binaries

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the finite arm-length of LISA affects gravitational wave analysis from massive black hole binaries, revealing improved localization accuracy for certain binaries when accounting for wave effects at shorter wavelengths.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed study of finite arm-length effects on LISA's parameter estimation, showing enhanced positional accuracy for some binaries compared to previous long wave approximations.

Findings

Improved three-dimensional localization for some binaries.

Significant accuracy gains at around 10^5 solar masses.

Finite arm-length effects are crucial for precise parameter estimation.

Abstract

Response of an interferometer becomes complicated for gravitational wave shorter than the arm-length of the detector, as nature of wave appears strongly. We have studied how parameter estimation for merging massive black hole binaries are affected by this complicated effect in the case of LISA. It is shown that three dimensional positions of some binaries might be determined much better than the past estimations that use the long wave approximation. For equal mass binaries this improvement is most prominent at $\sim 10^5\sol$.