English

The new generation lunar gravitational wave detectors: sky map resolution and joint analysis

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-05-12 v2 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

Lunar-based gravitational-wave interferometry is a fascinating endeavor, and was proposed as a promising approach to bridge the observational gap between space-borne and ground-based detectors. In this work, we adopt the Fisher-matrix method to examine the angular-resolution performance of the newly proposed Crater Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory (CIGO) on the lunar crater rim near the north pole, together with TianQin and LISA, for monochromatic sources in the 0.1-10 Hz band. We find that above 0.1 Hz, CIGO achieves better localization accuracy than the other two space-based missions and dominates the combined detector network's performance, provided that lunar noise mitigation is achieved in the 0.1-2.87 Hz frequency range. We further explore an upgraded Tetrahedron configuration, TCIGO, with a fourth station at the bottom of a crater, which forms a regular tetrahedral constellation on the lunar surface. The result shows that TCIGO yields a five-fold improvement in angular-resolution capability over CIGO and gets better sky coverage across the target frequency band.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.23556,
  title  = {The new generation lunar gravitational wave detectors: sky map resolution and joint analysis},
  author = {Xiaolin Zhang and Chengye Yu and Haoran Li and Sobhan Kazempour and Mingqiu Li and Sichun Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23556},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 8 figures. v1: original submission. v2: updated to match accepted manuscript