Diffraction around caustics in gravitational wave lensing

Gravitational lensing magnification is maximal around caustics. At these source locations, an incoming wave from a point source would formally experience an infinite amplification in the high-frequency or geometric optics limit. This divergence reflects the breakdown of the mathematical formalism, which is regularized by either the finite size of the source or its wavelength. We explore diffraction around caustics and their implications for the distortion of waveforms from point sources, focusing on three types of caustics: point singularities, folds, and cusps. We derive analytical results for the amplitude and phase of the diffracted waves and compare those against the stationary phase approximation. We then study the observational signatures and detectability of these distortions on gravitational waves. We find that the lensing distortions could be detectable but that the stationary phase approximation is still a good description of the system even close to the caustic, when the repeated gravitational wave chirps interfere with each other. We also quantify the possibility of distinguishing lensed signals from different caustics by performing Bayesian parameter estimation on simulated signals. Our results demonstrate that the universal distortions due to diffraction around caustics could be used to single out a gravitational wave event as lensed.