Accelerating gravitational wave parameter estimation with multi-band template interpolation

Understand

Parameter estimation on gravitational wave signals from compact binary coalescence (CBC) requires the evaluation of computationally intensive waveform models, typically the bottleneck in the analysis.

• This cost will increase further as low frequency sensitivity in later second and third generation detectors motivates the use of longer waveforms.
• We describe a method for accelerating parameter estimation by exploiting the chirping behaviour of the signals to sample the waveform sparsely for portions where the full frequency resolution is not required.
• We demonstrate that the method can reproduce the original results with a waveform mismatch of $\leq 5\times 10^{-7}$, but with a waveform generation cost up to $\sim 50$ times lower for computationally costly frequency-domain waveforms starting from below 8 Hz.