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This work studies microlensing effects in strongly lensed gravitational wave (GW) signals corresponding to global minima images in galaxy-scale lenses.
- We find that stellar microlenses alone are unable to introduce noticeable wave effects in the global minima GW signals at strong lensing magnification $(\mu)<50$ with match value between unlensed and lensed GW signals being above ${\sim}99.5\%$ in ${\sim}90\%$ of systems implying that GW signals corresponding to global minima can be treated as reference signal to determine the amount of microlensing in other strongly lensed counterparts.
- Since the stellar microlenses introduce negligible wave effects in global minima, they can be used to probe the intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) lenses in the galaxy lens.
- We show that the presence of an IMBH lens with mass in the range $[50,10^3] {\rm M_\odot}$ such that the global minima lies within five Einstein radius of it, the microlensing effects at $f<10^2$Hz are mainly determined by the IMBH lens for $\mu<50$.