Gravitational-wave astronomy with a physical calibration model

TL;DR

This paper assesses the impact of physical calibration models on gravitational-wave data analysis, finding that calibration errors are negligible compared to other systematic uncertainties, and demonstrates efficient inference methods using LIGO-Virgo data.

Contribution

It introduces a physically motivated calibration model for gravitational-wave inference and shows importance sampling reduces computational costs effectively.

Findings

Calibration errors have negligible impact on GWTC-1 event parameters.

Importance sampling effectively reduces analysis computational cost.

Calibration error estimates improve with standard siren measurements.

Abstract

We carry out astrophysical inference for compact binary merger events in LIGO-Virgo's first gravitational-wave transient catalog (GWTC-1) using a physically motivated calibration model. We demonstrate that importance sampling can be used to reduce the cost of what would otherwise be a computationally challenging analysis. We show that including the physical estimate for the calibration error distribution has negligible impact on the inference of parameters for the events in GWTC-1. Studying a simulated signal with matched filter signal-to-noise ratio $\text{SNR}=200$, we project that a calibration error estimate typical of GWTC-1 is likely to be negligible for the current generation of gravitational-wave detectors. We argue that other sources of systematic error---from waveforms, prior distributions, and noise modelling---are likely to be more important. Finally, using the events in GWTC-1 as standard sirens, we infer an astrophysically-informed improvement on the estimate of the calibration error in the LIGO interferometers.