Compact Binary Coalescence Gravitational Wave Signals Counting and Separation

TL;DR

The paper introduces UnMixFormer, an attention-based neural network that accurately counts and separates overlapping gravitational wave signals from various binary systems, even with complex waveform features and multiple concurrent events.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-decoder, attention-based architecture capable of disentangling multiple overlapping GW signals and estimating their count, surpassing existing methods in complexity handling.

Findings

Achieves 99.89% counting accuracy on synthetic data.

Attains a mean waveform overlap of 0.9831.

Generalizes well to signals with spin, eccentricity, and higher modes.

Abstract

As next-generation gravitational-wave (GW) observatories approach unprecedented sensitivities, the need for robust methods to analyze increasingly complex, overlapping signals becomes ever more pressing. Existing matched-filtering approaches and deep-learning techniques can typically handle only one or two concurrent signals, offering limited adaptability to more varied and intricate superimposed waveforms. To overcome these constraints, we present the UnMixFormer, an attention-based architecture that not only identifies the unknown number of concurrent compact binary coalescence GW events but also disentangles their individual waveforms through a multi-decoder architecture, even when confronted with five overlapping signals. Our UnMixFormer is capable of capturing both short- and long-range dependencies by modeling them in a dual-path manner, while also enhancing periodic feature representation by incorporating Fourier Analysis Networks. Our approach adeptly processes binary black hole, binary neutron star, and neutron star-black hole systems over extended time series data (16,384 samples). When evaluating on synthetic data with signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) ranging from 10 to 50, our method achieves 99.89% counting accuracy, a mean overlap of 0.9831 between separated waveforms and templates, and robust generalization ability to waveforms with spin precession, orbital eccentricity, and higher modes, marking a substantial advance in the precision and versatility of GW data analysis.