Sudhir Gholap | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

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

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 ($μ_r$). 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.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

A $χ^2$ statistic for the identification of strongly lensed gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences

Gravitational waves (GWs) emanated by stellar mass compact binary coalescences (CBCs), and lensed by galaxy- or cluster-scale lenses, will produce two or more copies of the GW signal. These will have identical phase evolution but differing amplitudes. Such lensing signatures are expected to be detected by the end of the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra's (LVK's) fifth observing run (O5). In this work, we propose a novel $χ_{\mathrm{lens}}^2$ statistic to segregate pairs of detected GW events as either lensed or unlensed, using templates typically used in GW searches. The statistic is an application of the generalized $χ^2$ discriminator described in \citet{dhurandhar2017}, tailored to probe the similarity (or lack thereof) between the phase evolutions of two CBC signals. We assess the performance of $χ_{\mathrm{lens}}^2$ on a realistic astrophysical dataset of lensed and unlensed CBCs detectable in O4, assuming a single LIGO-like detector at design sensitivity. We find that we can correctly identify lensed events with efficiencies comparable to existing Bayesian and machine learning methods. Evaluating $χ_{\mathrm{lens}}^2$ is orders of magnitude faster than Bayesian methods. Moreover, the statistics of $χ_{\mathrm{lens}}^2$, in stationary Gaussian noise, are fully understood, in contrast to machine learning methods. $χ_{\mathrm{lens}}^2$ can, therefore, be used to rapidly and accurately weed out the vast majority of unlensed candidate pairs and identify lensed pairs.

gr-qc↗