Research Activity: Athena and LISA White Papers
This post summarizes three white papers to which I contributed, one about the European Space agency (ESA) mission Athena and the other two related to the ESA/NASA mission LISA, the Laser-Interferometer Space Antenna.
Papers Highlighted
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LISA Consortium Waveform Working Group. “Waveform Modelling for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.” arXiv:2311.01300.
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K. G. Arun, et al. “New Horizons for Fundamental Physics with LISA.” Living Rev. Relativ. 25, 4 (2022), arXiv:2205.01597.
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L. Piro et al. “Multi-messenger Athena Synergy White Paper.” Exp. Astron. 54, 23-117 (2022), arXiv:2110.15677.
Summary of the Papers
The first paper on Athena focused on what one can learn from multi-messenger observations of gravitational waves from binary neutron stars and black-hole–neutron-star binaries with future ground based detectors (such as Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope) and x-ray observations of the electromagnetic emission from these mergers using the Athena mission. The most promising avenues were understanding the demographics of the x-ray afterglows from gamma-ray bursts. Measuring precursor flares or the prompt emission from the merger, as well as x-rays from the kilonova could even be possible.
The next two papers are related to the planned LISA gravitational-wave detector. The first on fundamental physics is a broad summary of the wide range of theoretical physics topics that can be studied with LISA. I contributed to the parts on gravitational-wave probes of dark matter and of measurements of gravitational-wave memory effects. The second on waveform modeling focused more on the analytical and numerical calculations of gravitational waves that will need to be performed to make detections of gravitational wave sources and to analyze the properties of these sources. I similarly contributed to the parts on dark-matter effects in the gravitational waves, and gravitational-wave memory-effect waveform models.