Pith. sign in

REVIEW 8 cited by

Probing minihalo lenses with diffracted gravitational waves

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2403.13876 v1 pith:UJFUBKZF submitted 2024-03-20 gr-qc astro-ph.CO

Probing minihalo lenses with diffracted gravitational waves

classification gr-qc astro-ph.CO
keywords gravitationallensedsignalswhencurrentdetectorsidentifiedminihalos
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

When gravitational waves pass near a gravitating object, they are deflected, or lensed. If the object is massive, such that the wavelength of the waves is small compared to its gravitational size, lensed gravitational wave events can be identified when multiple signals are detected at different times. However, when the wavelength is long, wave-optics diffraction effects will be important, and a lensed event can be identified by looking for frequency-dependent modulations to the gravitational waveform, without having to associate multiple signals. For current ground-based gravitational wave detectors observing stellar-mass binary compact object mergers, wave-optics effects are important for lenses with masses $\lesssim 1000 M_{\odot}$. Therefore, minihalos below this mass range could potentially be identified by lensing diffraction. The challenge with analyzing these events is that the frequency-dependent lensing modulation, or the amplification factor, is prohibitively expensive to compute for Bayesian parameter inference. In this work, we use a novel time-domain method to construct interpolators of the amplification factor for the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW), generalized singular isothermal sphere (gSIS) and cored isothermal sphere (CIS) lens models. Using these interpolators, we perform Bayesian inference on gravitational-wave signals lensed by minihalos injected in mock detector noise, assuming current sensitivity of ground-based detectors. We find that we could potentially identify an event when it is lensed by minihalos and extract the values of all lens parameters in addition to the parameters of the GW source. All of the methods are implemented in Glworia, the accompanying open-source Python package, and can be generalized to study lensed signals detected by current and next-generation detectors.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Effective description of lensed gravitational waves diffracted by stellar fields

    astro-ph.HE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Authors synthesize SVD-based reduced-order models from wave-optics simulations to provide an effective stochastic description of stellar microlensing distortions on lensed gravitational waves.

  2. The diffraction-lensing interpretation of GW231123 with astrophysical priors

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    GW231123 is better fit by a lower-mass merger diffracted by an isolated ~1000 M_sun lens, but astrophysical priors and a frequentist rate estimate make this lensing interpretation unlikely.

  3. Identifying lensed gravitational waves with physics-informed posterior learning

    gr-qc 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Fusing a simulation-trained common-source mass posterior with waveform features raises lensed-event detection efficiency from 20.8% to 35.2% at 1% false-positive rate and lowers the SNR for 50% efficiency from 45.3 to 33.5.

  4. Across the Universe: GW231123 as a magnified and diffracted black hole merger

    astro-ph.GA 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0

    GW231123's extreme mass and spins may be explained by a point-mass microlens embedded in a galaxy, reducing the inferred source mass to about 100-180 solar masses.

  5. Parameter inference of millilensed gravitational waves using neural spline flows

    gr-qc 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Neural spline flows perform fast posterior inference on 11-dimensional millilensed GW parameters with accuracy comparable to dynesty for most quantities and a 3-day to 0.8-second speedup.

  6. Detection of cosmic strings by gravitational wave lensing. Predictions for Einstein Telescope

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Simulated cosmic-string lensing of binary black holes predicts Einstein Telescope would detect the events and infer Gµ ≈ 1e-10, though the source geometry is assumed ad hoc.

  7. Discovering gravitational waveform distortions from lensing: A deep dive into GW231123

    gr-qc 2025-12 conditional novelty 5.0

    GW231123's apparent gravitational-lensing signal has a false-alarm probability around 4σ, so the event cannot be claimed as lensed under the two-image wave-optics model.

  8. Accelerated inference of microlensed gravitational waves with machine learning

    astro-ph.CO 2025-11 conditional novelty 5.0

    A neural posterior estimator trained on wave-optics-microlensed gravitational-wave signals recovers source and lens parameters and Bayes factors consistent with Bilby, about 10 times faster.