False positives for gravitational lensing: the gravitational-wave perspective
arXiv:2407.12974 · doi:10.1098/rsta.2024.0128
Abstract
For the first detection of a novel astrophysical phenomenon, scientific standards are particularly high. Especially in a multi-messenger context, there are also opportunity costs to follow-up observations on any detection claims. So in searching for the still elusive lensed gravitational waves, care needs to be taken in controlling false positives. In particular, many methods for identifying strong lensing rely on some form of parameter similarity or waveform consistency, which under rapidly growing catalog sizes can expose them to false positives from coincident but unlensed events if proper care is not taken. And searches for waveform deformations in all lensing regimes are subject to degeneracies we need to mitigate between lensing, intrinsic parameters, insufficiently modelled effects such as orbital eccentricity, or even deviations from general relativity. Robust lensing studies also require understanding and mitigating glitches and non-stationarities in the detector data. This article reviews sources of possible false positives (and their flip side: false negatives) in gravitational-wave lensing searches and the main approaches the community is pursuing to mitigate them.
14 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society special issue on Multi-Messenger Gravitational Lensing
References in corpus (17)
- Array Programming with NumPy
- GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
- Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
- Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
- Advanced LIGO
- GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of
- Search for gravitational lensing signatures in LIGO-Virgo binary black hole events
- A Horizon Study for Cosmic Explorer: Science, Observatories, and Community
- Eccentric binary black hole surrogate models for the gravitational waveform and remnant properties: comparable mass, nonspinning case
- Subtracting glitches from gravitational-wave detector data during the third observing run
- On the waveforms of gravitationally lensed gravitational waves
- Search for Lensed Gravitational Waves Including Morse Phase Information: An Intriguing Candidate in O2
- Exploring the hidden Universe: A novel phenomenological approach for recovering arbitrary gravitational-wave millilensing configurations
- Identifying strongly lensed gravitational waves through their phase consistency
- A unified approach to discriminators for searches of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences
- Incorporation of Statistical Data Quality Information into the GstLAL Search Analysis
- Wave Mechanics, Interference, and Decoherence in Strong Gravitational Lensing