ANGULAR RESOLUTION OF LISA

LISA is a space-borne, laser-interferometric gravitational wave detect or currently under study by the European Space Agency. We give a brief introduction about the main features of the detector, concentrating o n its one-year orbital motion around the Sun. We show that the amplitu de as well as the phase of a gravitational wave is modulated due to th at motion, allowing us to extract information from the signal. The mos t common way to estimate the parameters which characterize a signal pr esent in a noisy data stream is to use the matched filtering technique . A brief review of the theory of parameter estimation, based on the w ork of Finn and Curter, will be given. We carried out a simulation of the detection of a monochromatic gravitational wave based on that theo ry and focusing on estimating the angular parameters of the source. Th e results of the semi-analytic calculations are presented in detail an d interpreted to determine the angular resolution of LISA.