Speaker
Description
We introduce a novel method to generate a bank of gravitational-waveform templates of binary black hole (BBH) coalescences for matched-filter searches in LIGO and Virgo data. Unlike the standard approach, our method relies on a numerical metric approximation of the distance between templates, which makes the template placement orders of magnitude faster than with existing techniques.
Our method applies to a variety of different manifolds of signals and is particularly suitable for covering high dimensional spaces, such as those associated with precessing and/or eccentric waveforms.
We compare our method with the state-of-the-art stochastic placement code and we find that our code slightly overcovers the space, while achieving similar efficiency in recovering signals.
We use our publicly released code mbank to generate a precessing and an eccentric bank ready for production, both covering interesting and yet unexplored regions of the BBH parameter space. These two ready-to-use banks will facilitate the next generation searches for gravitational waves, hitherto unfeasible due to the prohibitive cost of bank generation.
We also discuss future improvements of our method using a Normalizing Flow model.
