Gravitational lensing of gravitational waves: wave nature and prospects for detection

Understand

We discuss the gravitational lensing of gravitational wave signals from coalescing binaries.

• We delineate the regime where wave effects are significant from the regime where geometric limit can be used.
• Further, we focus on the effect of micro-lensing and the combined effect of strong lensing and micro-lensing.
• We find that micro-lensing combined with strong lensing can introduce time varying phase shift in the signal and hence can lead to detectable differences in the signal observed for different images produced by strong lensing.