How the spherical modes of gravitational waves can be detected despite only seeing one ray

Abstract

Abstract The spherical modes of gravitational waves (GWs) have become a major focus of recent detection campaigns due to the additional information they can provide about different properties of the source. However, GW detection is restricted to only detecting one ray and hence it is not obvious how we can extract information about angular properties. In this note, we introduce a new gauge that makes visible GW detection does not only contain information on the second time derivative but also on the angular derivatives of the GW. In particular, we show that the angular derivatives are of the same order as the time derivatives of the wave thus allowing us to constrain the spherical modes. To further illustrate the detection of the spherical modes, we discuss how the evolution of the orbit of the source and thus the phase of the wave depends on them.