Integrated cosmological memory: A dark-siren method to probe dark energy

arXiv:2608.03739 · astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-th · Submitted 2026-08-11 · Read on arXiv

Indranil Chakraborty, Sayantan Ghosh, Susmita Jana, Archana Pai, S. Shankaranarayanan

astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-th

Submitted: 2026-08-11

Updated: 2026-08-12

Comments: Submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters. 16 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Gravitational-wave (GW) cosmology is currently bottlenecked by the scarcity of electromagnetic counterparts for bright sirens and the systematic uncertainties of galaxy catalogs for dark sirens.

Terminology

Integrated Cosmological Memory — 5× in this paper
Degeneracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Quintessence — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Bayesian Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Bayesian Parameter Estimation — 1× in this paper
Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
Cosmic Explorer — 1× in this paper
Einstein Telescope — 1× in this paper
Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Hubble Tension — 1× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
Modified Gravity (MG) — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Abstract

Gravitational-wave (GW) cosmology is currently bottlenecked by the scarcity of electromagnetic counterparts for bright sirens and the systematic uncertainties of galaxy catalogs for dark sirens. We propose a purely gravitational resolution using the Integrated Cosmological Memory (ICM)-the cumulative GW strain encoded in the spacetime geometry of an expanding Universe. While the GW transient emitted by the source provides the luminosity distance, the ICM accumulates a mathematically distinct integral of the cosmic expansion history. We demonstrate that extracting both observables from a single binary merger completely breaks the distance-redshift degeneracy within the gravitational sector. This establishes a novel, catalog-free dark siren framework for third-generation GW detector networks. Crucially, the resulting constraints on late-time dark energy are only weakly sensitive to the local expansion rate, providing a robust cosmological probe that can potentially mitigate the impact of the H0 tension.

Sources

Exploring the Impact of Systematic Bias in Type Ia Supernova Cosmology Across Diverse Dark Energy Parametrizations

Terminology

Abstract

Sources

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