Accuracy of estimation of parameters with space-borne gravitational wave observatory

Abstract

Employing the Fisher information matrix approximation, we estimate the errors of parameters with TianQin and LISA for monochromatic gravitational waves. With the long-wavelength approximation we give analytical formulas for the parameter estimation errors. We analyze the amplitude modulation due to the changing orientation of the detector plane and the Doppler effect due to the translational motion of the center of the detector around the Sun. We disclose that in the low frequency regimes there exist different patterns in angular resolutions and estimation errors of the signal's parameters between LISA and TianQin. The angular resolutions and the estimation errors of the signal's parameters fall off as S n (f )/f 2 for TianQin but S n (f ) for LISA. However in the medium frequency regimes we observe the same patterns where the angular resolutions fall off as S n (f )/f 2 and the estimation errors of the signal's parameters fall off as S n (f ) for both TianQin and LISA. In the high frequency regimes, the long-wavelength approximation fails, we numerically calculate the parameter estimation errors for LISA and TianQin and find that the parameter estimation errors measured by TianQin are better than those by LISA.

Detection of gravitational wave mixed polarization with single space-based detectors

“…In the past years, different methods were developed to probe nontensorial polarizations in stochastic GW backgrounds [34][35][36], continuous GWs [37][38][39][40], GW bursts [41,42] and GWs from compact binary coalescences [43,44]. In particular, the Fisher information matrix approximation was usually used to estimate the parameters of the source and to discuss the measurement of polarization modes [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”