Removing degeneracy and multimodality in gravitational wave source parameters
| Autor: | Javier Roulet, Seth Olsen, Jonathan Mushkin, Tousif Islam, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Barak Zackay, Matias Zaldarriaga |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: |
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
FOS: Physical sciences General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology |
| Popis: | Quasicircular binary black hole mergers are described by 15 parameters, of which gravitational wave observations can typically constrain only $\sim 10$ independent combinations to varying degree. In this work, we devise coordinates that remove correlations, and disentangle well- and poorly-measured quantities. Additionally, we identify approximate discrete symmetries in the posterior as the primary cause of multimodality, and design a method to tackle this type of multimodality. The resulting posteriors have little structure and can be sampled efficiently and robustly. We provide a Python package for parameter estimation, cogwheel, that implements these methods together with other algorithms for accelerating the inference process. One of the coordinates we introduce is a spin azimuth that is measured remarkably well in several events. We suggest this might be a sensitive indicator of orbital precession, and we anticipate that it will shed light on the occurrence of spin-orbit misalignment in nature. 17 pages, 13 figures, 1 table. Matches version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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