Session J9 - Experimental Gravity and Gravitational Radiation.
FOCUS session, Sunday afternoon, April 29
Room 2, Renaissance Hotel
We calculate the bounds which could be placed on scalar-tensor theories of gravity by measurements of gravitational waveforms from inspiralling binaries. Systems of interest are those detectable by LISA, the proposed space laser interferometric observatory, specifically neutron stars (NS) spiralling into supermassive black holes (SMBH). Observation of these systems by LISA may allow for significantly more stringent bounds on the scalar-tensor coupling parameter ømega than are achievable from solar system or binary pulsar measurements. For NS-SMBH collisions, dipole gravitational radiation modifies the inspiral, and generates an additional term in the phasing of the emitted gravitational waveform. Bounds on ømega can therefore be found by using the technique of matched filtering. We compute the Fisher information matrix for a waveform accurate to second post-Newtonian order, including the effect of dipole radiation, and determine the bounds on omega for several different NS-SMBH canonical systems.