The importance of the ''magnetic'' components of gravitational waves in the response functions of interferometers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the magnetic components of gravitational waves and their impact on interferometer response functions, providing detailed angular and frequency dependence for LIGO and Virgo, emphasizing the importance of considering these components for accurate detection.

Contribution

The paper offers detailed calculations of the magnetic components' response functions for gravitational waves, extending previous work to include frequency and angular dependencies relevant to LIGO and Virgo.

Findings

Magnetic components significantly affect interferometer response functions.

Response functions depend on frequency and angle, especially at high frequencies.

Results align with prior work in the long-wavelength limit.

Abstract

With an enlighting analysis, Baskaran and Grishchuk have recently shown the presence and importance of the so-called ``magnetic'' components of gravitational waves (GWs), which have to be taken into account in the context of the total response functions of interferometers for GWs propagating from arbitrary directions. In this paper more detailed angular and frequency dependences of the response functions for the magnetic components are given in the approximation of wavelength much larger than the linear dimensions of the interferometer, with a specific application to the parameters of the LIGO and Virgo interferometers. Our results agree with the work of Baskaran and Grishchuk in which it has been shown that the identification of ``electric'' and ``magnetic'' contributions is unambiguous in the long-wavelength approximation. At the end of this paper the angular and frequency dependences of the total response functions of the LIGO and Virgo interferometers are given. In the high-frequency regime the division on ``electric'' and ``magnetic'' components becomes ambiguous, thus the full theory of gravitational waves has to be used. Our results are consistent with the ones of Baskaran and Grishchuk in this case too.