Speaker
Alice Garoffolo
Description
The growing observational prospects for gravitational waves make wave-optics effects in gravitational lensing increasingly relevant. In this talk, I will first show that the standard diffraction integral relies on approximations that can be systematically understood and extended using scattering theory. This provides a way to go beyond the usual wave-optics treatment of lensing. I will then discuss a first example in modified gravity, where some curvature couplings produce signatures that are visible only in the wave-optics regime. The main point is that gravitational-wave lensing can be used not only to study compact lenses, but also to probe aspects of gravitational propagation that are hidden in geometric optics.