Scattering of Gravitational Radiation: Intensity Fluctuations

Abstract

The effect of gravitational microlensing on the intensity of gravitational radiation as it propagates through an inhomogeneous medium containing small-scale structure is considered. Lensing by both stars and a power law spectrum of density perturbations is examined. The long wavelengths characteristic of gravitational radiation mandate a statistical, physical-optics approach to treat the effect of stellar microlensing. A model for the mass power spectrum of a starfield, including the effects of clustering and allowing for a distribution of stellar masses, is constructed and used to determine both the amplitude of fluctuations in the gravitational wave strain and its associated temporal fluctuation spectrum. For a uniformly distributed starfield the intensity variance scales linearly with stellar density, sigma, but is enhanced by a factor >sigma r_F^2 when clustering is important, where r_F is the Fresnel scale. The effect of lensing by a power law mass spectrum is also considered. For spectra with indices steeper than -2 the wave amplitude exhibits rms fluctuations 1.3 < Delta Sigma^2 >^0.25 (D_eff/1 Gpc)^0.5 %, where <Delta Sigma^2> is the variance in the mass surface density measured in M_sun^2 pc^-4 and D_eff is the effective distance to the lensing medium. For shallower spectra the amplitude of the fluctuations depends additionally on the inner length scale and power law index of the density fluctuations. The intensity fluctuations are dominated by temporal fluctuations on too long a timescale to be observable.