Detection of gravitational wave mixed polarization with single space-based detectors

Understand

General Relativity predicts only two tensor polarization modes for gravitational waves while at most six possible polarization modes are allowed in general metric theory of gravity.

• The number of polarization modes is determined by the specific modified theory of gravity.
• Therefore, the determination of polarization modes can be used to test gravitational theory.
• We introduce a concrete data analysis pipeline for a space-based detector such as LISA to detect the polarization modes of gravitational waves.