Reducing the impact of weak-lensing errors on gravitational-wave standard sirens

The mergers of supermassive black hole binaries can serve as standard sirens: the gravitational-wave (GW) analogue of standard candles. The upcoming space-borne GW detectors will be able to discover such systems and estimate their luminosity distances precisely. Unfortunately, weak gravitational lensing can induce significant errors in the measured distance of these standard sirens at high redshift, severely limiting their usefulness as precise distance probes. The uncertainty due to weak lensing can be reduced if the lensing magnification of the siren can be estimated independently, a procedure called 'delensing'. With the help of up-to-date numerical simulations, here we investigate how much the weak-lensing errors can be reduced using convergence maps reconstructed from shear measurements. We also evaluate the impact of delensing on cosmological parameter estimation with bright standard sirens. We find that the weak-lensing errors for sirens at z(s) = 2.9 can be reduced by about a factor of two on average, but to achieve this would require expensive ultra-deep-field observations for every siren. Such an approach is likely to be practical in only limited cases, and the reduction in the weak-lensing error is therefore likely to be insufficient to significantly improve the cosmological parameter estimation. We conclude that performing delensing corrections is unlikely to be worthwhile, in contrast to the more positive expectations presented in previous studies. For delensing to become more practicable and useful in the future will require significant improvements in the resolution/depth of weak-lensing surveys and/or the methods to reconstruct convergence maps from these surveys.

Automated summary

The mergers of supermassive black hole binaries can serve as standard sirens in the study of cosmology, but the weak gravitational lensing can induce significant errors in the measured distance. In this study, using numerical simulations, we find that the weak-lensing errors can be reduced by about a factor of two using convergence maps reconstructed from shear measurements. However, implementing such an approach would require expensive ultra-deep-field observations for every standard siren, making it impractical in most cases.