Gravitational lensing on a binary mass lens: caustics and critical lines

Abstract

LIGO and Virgo interferometers have been able to detect gravitational waves resulting of the energy loss experienced by two compact objects orbiting around their common center of mass. When encountering massive objects, these gravitational waves can experience gravitational lensing while propagating through the Universe. This could lead to distortion effects encoded inside the detected signal, which means that one would have to consider these effects in order to obtain correct results. In this work, we want to study the gravitational wave lensing by a binary system, setting the bases for a future research of this effect near caustics and its application in gravitational wave detection.