Future prospects on testing extensions to ΛCDM through the weak lensing of gravitational waves

With planned space-based and 3rd generation ground-based gravitational wave detectors (LISA, Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer), and proposed DeciHz detectors (DECIGO, Big Bang Observer), it is timely to explore statistical cosmological tests that can be employed with the forthcoming plethora of data, $10^4-10^6$ mergers a year. We forecast the combination of the standard siren measurement with the weak lensing of gravitational waves from binary mergers. For 10 years of 3rd generation detector runtime, this joint analysis will constrain the dark energy equation of state with marginalised $1\sigma$ uncertainties of $\sigma(w_0)$~0.005 and $\sigma(w_a)$~0.04. This is comparable to or better than forecasts for future galaxy/intensity mapping surveys, and better constraints are possible when combining these and other future probes with gravitational waves. We find that combining mergers with and without an electromagnetic counterpart helps break parameter degeneracies. Using DeciHz detectors in the post-LISA era, we demonstrate for the first time how merging binaries could achieve a precision on the sum of neutrino masses of $\sigma(\Sigma m_{\nu})$~0.05 eV using $3\times10^6$ sources up to $z=3.5$ with a distance uncertainty of $1\%$, and ~percent or sub-percent precision also on curvature, dark energy, and other parameters, independently from other probes. Finally, we demonstrate how the cosmology dependence in the redshift distribution of mergers can be exploited to improve dark energy constraints if the cosmic merger rate is known, instead of relying on measured distributions as is standard in cosmology. In the coming decades gravitational waves will become a formidable probe of both geometry and large scale structure.