Descope of the ALIA mission
Abstract
The present work reports on a feasibility study commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences of China to explore various possible mission options to detect gravitational waves in space alternative to that of the eLISA/LISA mission concept. Based on the relative merits assigned to science and technological viability, a few representative mission options descoped from the ALIA mission are considered. A semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulation is carried out to understand the cosmic black hole merger histories starting from intermediate mass black holes at high redshift as well as the possible scientific merits of the mission options considered in probing the light seed black holes and their coevolution with galaxies in early Universe. The study indicates that, by choosing the armlength of the interferometer to be three million kilometers and shifting the sensitivity floor to around one-hundredth Hz, together with a very moderate improvement on the position noise budget, there are certain mission options capable of exploring light seed, intermediate mass black hole binaries at high redshift that are not readily accessible to eLISA/LISA, and yet the technological requirements seem to within reach in the next few decades for China.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1410.7296,
title = {Descope of the ALIA mission},
author = {Xuefei Gong and Yun-Kau Lau and Shengnian Xu and Pau Amaro-Seoane and Shan Bai and Xing Bian and Zhoujian Cao and Gerui Chen and Xian Chen and Yanwei Ding and Peng Dong and Wei Gao and Gerhard Heinzel and Ming Li and Shuo Li and Fukun Liu and Ziren Luo and Mingxue Shao and Rainer Spurzem and Baosan Sun and Wenlin Tang and Yan Wang and Peng Xu and Pin Yu and Yefei Yuan and Xiaomin Zhang and Zebing Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.7296},
year = {2015}
}