Detecting the Beaming Effect of Gravitational Waves

Abstract

The models currently used in the detection of gravitational waves (GWs) either do not consider a relative motion between the center-of-mass of the source and the observer, or usually only consider its effect on the frequencies of GWs. However, it is known for light waves that a relative motion not only changes the frequencies but also the brightness of the source, the latter of which is called the `beaming effect'. Here we investigate such an effect for GWs and find that the observed amplitude of a GW signal, unlike the behavior of light, is not a monotonic function of the relative velocity and responds differently to the two GW polarizations. We attribute the difference to a rotation of the wave-vector, as well as a reorientation of the GW polarizations. We find that even for velocities as small as $0.25\%$ of the speed of light, ignoring the aforementioned beaming effect could induce a systematic error that is larger than the designated calibration accuracy of LIGO. This error could lead to an incorrect estimation of the distance and orbital inclination of a GW source, or result in a spurious signal that appears to be incompatible with general relativity.