Tunable compression of template banks for fast gravitational-wave detection and localisation

TL;DR

This paper introduces tunable compression schemes for gravitational-wave template banks, enabling faster detection and localization with improved sensitivity, especially beneficial for space-based detectors like eLISA.

Contribution

The paper proposes and evaluates novel tunable compression methods for template banks, enhancing detection speed and accuracy in gravitational-wave searches.

Findings

Faster detection and localization with compressed banks.

Moderate sensitivity and accuracy improvements.

Applicable to long-duration waveform searches in space-based detectors.

Abstract

One strategy for reducing the online computational cost of matched-filter searches for gravitational waves is to introduce a compressed basis for the waveform template bank in a grid-based search. In this paper, we propose and investigate several tunable compression schemes for a general template bank. Through offline compression, such schemes are shown to yield faster detection and localisation of signals, along with moderately improved sensitivity and accuracy over coarsened banks at the same level of computational cost. This is potentially useful for any search involving template banks, and especially in the analysis of data from future space-based detectors such as eLISA, for which online grid searches are difficult due to the long-duration waveforms and large parameter spaces.