Prospects for constraining interacting dark energy models from gravitational wave and gamma ray burst joint observation

With the measurement of the electromagnetic (EM) counterpart, a gravitational wave (GW) event could be treated as a standard siren. As a novel cosmological probe, GW standard sirens will bring significant implications for cosmology. In this paper, by considering the coincident detections of GW and associated 7 ray burst (GRB), we find that only about 400 GW bright standard sirens from binary neutron star mergers could be detected in a 10-year observation of the Einstein Telescope and the THESEUS satellite mission. Based on this mock sample, we investigate the implications of GW standard sirens on the interaction between dark energy and dark matter. In our analysis, four viable interacting dark energy (IDE) models, with interaction forms Q = 3/3Hpde and Q = 3/3Hpc, are considered. Compared with the traditional EM observational data such as CMB, BAO, and SN Ia, the combination of both GW and EM observations could effectively break the degeneracies between different cosmological parameters and provide more stringent cosmological fits. We find that the GW data could play a more important role for determining the interaction in the models with Q = 3/3Hpc, compared with the models with Q = 3/3Hpde. We also show that constraining IDE models with mock GW data based on different fiducial H0 values yield different results, indicating that accurate determination of H0 is significant for exploring the interaction between dark energy and dark matter.

Automated summary

With the measurement of the electromagnetic counterpart, gravitational wave standard sirens can be used as a novel cosmological probe with significant implications for cosmology. In this paper, the implications of GW standard sirens on the interaction between dark energy and dark matter are investigated, based on the coincident detections of GW and associated γ-ray bursts (GRB). The combination of both GW and EM observations can effectively break the degeneracies between different cosmological parameters and provide more stringent cosmological fits.