Efficient Gravitational Wave Template Bank Generation with Differentiable Waveforms

Abstract

The most sensitive search pipelines for gravitational waves from compact binary mergers use matched filters to extract signals from the noisy data stream coming from gravitational wave detectors. Matched-filter searches require banks of template waveforms covering the physical parameter space of the binary system. Unfortunately, template bank construction can be a time-consuming task. Here we present a new method for efficiently generating template banks that utilizes automatic differentiation to calculate the parameter space metric. Principally, we demonstrate that automatic differentiation enables accurate computation of the metric for waveforms currently used in search pipelines, whilst being computationally cheap. Additionally, by combining random template placement and a Monte Carlo method for evaluating the fraction of the parameter space that is currently covered, we show that search-ready template banks for frequency-domain waveforms can be rapidly generated. Finally, we argue that differentiable waveforms offer a pathway to accelerating stochastic placement algorithms. We implement all our methods into an easy-to-use Python package based on the jax framework, diffbank, to allow the community to easily take advantage of differentiable waveforms for future searches.

Gravitational waves and neutrino oscillations in Chern-Simons axion gravity

“…Compact objects such as boson stars (see Refs. [132,133]) could also contribute to the SGWB [134], to the extent that the inclusion of new template banks along with those already used for the search of BBH and BNS events by the LIGO detectors could realistically lead to the discovery of these exotic components [135,136]. New light bosons could also show up in GW detectors through the superradiant instability induced in the evolution of the boson cloud around rotating BHs (see e.g.…”