Accelerating Tests of General Relativity with Gravitational-Wave Signals using Hybrid Sampling

Abstract

The Advanced LIGO/Virgo interferometers have observed $\sim 100$ gravitational-wave transients enabling new questions to be answered about relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology. However, many of our current procedures for computing these constraints will not scale well with the increased size of future transient catalogs. We introduce a novel hybrid sampling method in order to more efficiently perform parameterized tests of general relativity with gravitational-wave signals. Applying our method to the binary black hole merger GW150914 and simulated signals we find that our method is approximately an order of magnitude more efficient than the current method with conservative settings for our hybrid analysis. While we have focused on the specific problem of measuring potential deviations from relativity, our method is of much wider applicability to any problem that can be decomposed into a simple and more complex model(s).

14 pages, 13 figures; modifications in response to referee report, including comparison to other MCMC initialization methods

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Fortifying gravitational-wave tests of general relativity against astrophysical assumptions
• The Return of GOLUM: Improving Distributed Joint Parameter Estimation for Strongly-Lensed Gravitational Waves
• The impact of selection biases on tests of general relativity with gravitational-wave inspirals
• Neural post-Einsteinian framework for efficient theory-agnostic tests of general relativity with gravitational waves
• No model-independent evidence for a peak in binary black hole spin (mis)alignments