Using overlap of sky localization probability maps for filtering potentially lensed pairs of gravitational-wave signals

Understand

Strong gravitational lensing creates multiple images of a gravitational wave transient.

• The current state-of-the-art method for identifying such lensing events is a computationally expensive full Bayesian analysis.
• In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and efficiency of using the overlap of sky localization probability maps (skymaps) to quickly filter potentially lensed gravitational wave signal pairs.
• We introduce three overlap statistics and test their performance using 200 simulated lensed pairs of gravitational-wave signals across five sets of signal-to-noise ratios.