GRAVITATIONAL LENSING OF GRAVITATIONAL-WAVES FROM MERGING NEUTRON-STAR BINARIES

We discuss the gravitational lensing of gravitational waves from mergi ng neutron star binaries, in the context of advanced LIGO type gravita tional wave detectors. An advanced LIGO should see unlensed inspiral e vents with a redshift distribution with cutoff at a redshift z(max) < 1 for h less than or equal to 0.8. Any inspiral events detected at z > z(max) should be lensed. We compute the expected total number of even ts which are present due to gravitational lensing and their redshift d istribution for an advanced LIGO in a flat universe. if the matter fra ction in compact lenses is close to 10%, an advanced LIGO should see a few strongly lensed events per year with a signal-to-noise ratio rho > 5.