Beyond Plane Waves: Coherent Network Response to Collimated Gravitational-Wave Wavepackets

Abstract

We present a paraxial wavepacket model for structured, collimated gravitational-wave bursts and derive the coherent response of detector networks to these signals. For current terrestrial baselines such as LIGO-Virgo, analytic mismatch estimates confirm that the paraxial wavepacket model waveforms are effectively indistinguishable from standard sine-Gaussian bursts, validating the robustness of the plane-wave approximation in this regime. However, we identify a physical scaling regime relevant to third-generation networks and galactic-scale Pulsar Timing Arrays in which finite transverse structure-motivated by wave-optics lensing or ultra-relativistic beaming induces non-negligible geometric phase shifts. A toy event-level Monte Carlo study compares a standard burst-search ranking with a paraxial wavepacket model-constrained statistic that penalizes geometric inconsistencies across detectors. In this controlled setup, the model prior yields an illustrative factor of $\sim 3$-$4$ gain in detection efficiency at a fixed false-alarm rate, while maintaining performance on plane-wave-like signals. These results suggest that paraxial corrections may provide a necessary metrological framework for signal discrimination and unbiased parameter estimation in future cosmic-scale observations.