Abstract Details

Name: Haris MK
Affiliation: ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru
Conference ID: ASI2019_497
Title : Identifying strongly lensed gravitational wave signals from binary black hole mergers
Authors and Co-Authors : K. Haris (ICTS-TIFR), Ajit Kumar Mehta (ICTS-TIFR), Sumit Kumar (AEI, Hannover), Tejaswi Venumadhav (IAS, Princeton), Parameswaran Ajith (ICTS-TIFR)
Abstract Type : Oral
Abstract Category : General Relativity and Cosmology
Abstract : Based on the rate of gravitational-wave (GW) detections by Advanced LIGO and Virgo, we expect these detectors to observe hundreds of binary black hole mergers as they achieve their design sensitivities. A small fraction of them can undergo strong gravitational lensing by intervening galaxies, resulting in multiple images of the same signal. To a very good approximation, the lensing magnifies/de-magnifies these GW signals without affecting their frequency profiles. We develop a Bayesian inference technique to identify pairs of strongly lensed images among hundreds of binary black hole events, demonstrate its performance using simulated GW observations and apply it on the first binary black hole events detected by LIGO and Virgo.