Measuring the polarization content of gravitational waves with strongly lensed binary black hole mergers

Abstract

Alternative theories of gravity predict up to six distinct polarization modes for gravitational waves. Strong gravitational lensing of gravitational waves allows us to probe the polarization content of these signals by effectively increasing the number of observations from the same astrophysical source. The lensing time delays due to the multiple observed lensed images combined with the rotation of the Earth allows for effective non-collocated interferometers to be defined with respect to the source location and hence probe the alternative polarization amplitudes with more observations. To measure these amplitudes, we jointly fit the image observations to a single gravitational wave signal model that takes into account the image magnifications, time delays, and polarization mode amplitudes. We show that for certain systems, we can make a measurement of the relative mode amplitudes for lensed events with two detectable images.