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arXiv · 2607.20661

A product template bank to search for compact binary coalescences microlensed by isolated point mass lenses

Sudhir Gholap·Sanjeev V. Dhurandhar·Shasvath J. Kapadia
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Abstract

Gravitational waves (GW) from stellar mass compact binary coalescences (CBCs) that encounter a lens whose Schwarzschild radius is comparable to the GW wavelength, will be microlensed, leading to frequency-dependent modulations in the observed signal. Neglecting such wave-optics effects in standard templated searches for CBCs can result in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) losses as large as 30%. Here, we present a prescription for constructing a template bank targeted at microlensed GWs. We consider CBCs microlensed by isolated point mass lenses, whose frequency-dependent amplification factor is known to have a closed-form analytical expression. However, to construct the template bank, it suffices to use the geometric optics approximation, effectively modeling the microlensed signal as overlapping signals. Moreover, given that matched filtering is mostly sensitive to the phase of the GW signal, we use the phase of the amplification factor to compute the metric elements. The usual CBC parameter space is appended by two extra parameters: (i) the time-delay ($t_d$) between images and (ii) the relative-magnification ($\mu_r$). By identifying the region of the lensing parameter space where the fitting factor (FF) falls below 97% due to wave-optics effects, we construct a template bank consisting of ~4000 templates covering the selected lensing region, independent of the values of the unlensed CBCs' parameters. We show that the bank targeting microlensed CBCs is, to a very good approximation, a Cartesian product of the unlensed CBC bank and the bank spanning the lensing parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating fitting factors using both the unlensed CBC bank and the product template bank, finding a reduction of up to a factor of ~10 in the mismatch, as well as consistency with the prescribed minimal match criterion of 0.97 used in the construction of the banks.

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BibTeXRIS

Sudhir Gholap, Sanjeev V. Dhurandhar, Shasvath J. Kapadia. 2026-07-22. A product template bank to search for compact binary coalescences microlensed by isolated point mass lenses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20661

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