Prospects of testing late-time cosmology with weak lensing of gravitational waves and galaxy surveys

Abstract

We investigate the synergy of upcoming galaxy surveys and gravitational wave (GW) experiments in constraining late-time cosmology, examining the cross-correlations between the weak lensing of gravitational waves (GW-WL) and the galaxy fields. Without focusing on any specific GW detector configuration, we benchmark the requirements for the high precision measurement of cosmological parameters by considering several scenarios, varying the number of detected GW events and the uncertainty on the inference of the source luminosity distance and redshift.We focus on ΛCDM and scalar-tensor cosmologies, using the Effective Field Theory formalism as a unifying language. We find that, in some of the explored setups, GW-WL contributes to the galaxy signal by doubling the accuracy on non-ΛCDM parameters, allowing in the most favourable scenarios to reach even percent and sub-percent level bounds. Though the most extreme cases presented here are likely beyond the observational capabilities of currently planned individual GW detectors, we show nonetheless that — provided that enough statistics of events can be accumulated — GW-WL offers the potential to become a cosmological probe complementary to LSS surveys, particularly for those parameters that cannot be constrained by other GW probes such as standard sirens.