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arXiv · 2302.00436

Gravitational-wave template banks for novel compact binaries

Stefano Schmidt·Bhooshan Gadre·Sarah Caudill
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Abstract

We introduce a novel method to generate a bank of gravitational-waveform templates of binary black hole (BBH) mergers for matched-filter searches in LIGO, Virgo and Kagra data.We derive a novel expression for the metric approximation to the distance between templates, which is suitable for precessing BBHs and/or systems with higher-order modes (HM) imprints and we use it to meaningfully define a template probability density across the parameter space. We employ a masked autoregressive normalizing flow model which can be conveniently trained to quickly reproduce the target probability distribution and sample templates from it. Thanks to the normalizing flow, our code takes a few {\it hours} to produce random template banks with millions of templates, making it particularly suitable for high-dimensional spaces, such as those associated to precession, eccentricity and/or HM. After validating the performance of our method, we generate a bank for precessing black holes and a bank for aligned-spin binaries with HMs: with only 5% of the injections with fitting factor below the target of 0.97, we show that both banks cover satisfactorily the space. Our publicly released code mbank will enable searches of high-dimensional regions of BBH signal space, hitherto unfeasible due to the prohibitive cost of bank generation.

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Stefano Schmidt, Bhooshan Gadre, Sarah Caudill. 2023-02-01. Gravitational-wave template banks for novel compact binaries. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00436

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