Neural network-based gravitational wave interpolant with applications to low-latency analyses

Abstract

Matched-filter-based gravitational wave search pipelines identify candidate events within seconds of their arrival on Earth, offering a chance to guide electromagnetic follow-up and observe multimessenger events. Understanding the detectors’ response to an astrophysical transient across the searched signal manifold is paramount to inferring the parameters of the progenitor and deciding which candidates warrant telescope time. We describe a framework that uses artificial neural networks to interpolate gravitational waves and, equivalently, the signal-to-noise ratio across sufficiently local patches of the signal manifold. Our machine-learning based model generates a single waveform in 6 ms on a CPU and 0.4 ms on a graphical processing unit (GPU). When using a GPU to generate batches of waveforms simultaneously, we find that we can produce 10⁴ waveforms in ≲1  ms. This is achieved while remaining faithful, on average, to 1 part in 10⁴ (1 part in 10⁵) for binary black hole (binary neutron star) waveforms. The model we present is designed to directly utilize intermediate detection pipeline outputs in the hopes of facilitating a better real-time understanding of gravitational wave candidates.

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