Forecasts for constraining Lorentz-violating damping of gravitational waves from compact binary inspirals

Violation of Lorentz symmetry can result in two distinct effects in the propagation of the gravitational waves (GWs). One is a modified dispersion relation and another is a frequency-dependent damping of GWs. While the former has been extensively studied in the literature, in this paper we concentrate on the frequency-dependent damping effect that arises from several specific Lorentz-violating theories, such as spatial covariant gravities, Hořava-Lifshitz gravities, etc. This Lorentz-violating damping effect changes the damping rate of GWs at different frequencies and leads to an amplitude correction to the GW waveform of compact binary inspiral systems. With this modified waveform, we then use the Fisher information matrix to investigate the prospects of constraining the Lorentz-violating damping effect with GW observations. We consider both ground-based and space-based GW detectors, including the advanced LIGO, Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer (CE), Taiji, TianQin, and LISA. Our results indicate that the ground-based detectors in general give tighter constraints than those from the space-based detectors. Among the considered three ground-based detectors, CE can give the tightest constraints on the Lorentz-violating damping effect, which improves the current constraint from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA events by about 8 times.