Speaker
Description
Gravitational-wave (GW) microlensing occurs when an intervening compact object diffracts the GW in the wave-optics regime, imprinting characteristic frequency-dependent modulations on the observed signal. Current searches for microlensing signatures in the detected GW events assume an isolated point mass lens (PML) model. However, this assumption is overly simplistic. Astrophysical microlenses are typically embedded within more complex structures, such as galaxies, whose potentials can significantly perturb the lensing signal. In this work, we extend the standard PML model to incorporate external galactic influences by considering microlenses perturbed by galaxy potentials. We demonstrate that neglecting host galaxy effects can systematically reduce sensitivity in microlensing searches, particularly for high microlens masses and at high signal-to-noise ratios.