SLICK: Strong Lensing Identification of Candidates Kindred in gravitational wave data

By the end of the next decade, we hope to have detected strongly lensed gravitational waves by galaxies or clusters. Although there exist optimal methods for identifying lensed signal, it is shown that machine learning (ML) algorithms can give comparable performance but are orders of magnitude faster than non-ML methods. We present the SLICK pipeline which comprises a parallel network based on deep learning. We analyse the Q-transform maps (QT maps) and the Sine-Gaussian maps (SGP-maps) generated for the binary black hole signals injected in Gaussian as well as real noise. We compare our network performance with the previous work and find that the efficiency of our model is higher by a factor of 5 at a false positive rate of 0.001. Further, we show that including SGP maps with QT maps data results in a better performance than analysing QT maps alone. When combined with sky localisation constraints, we hope to get unprecedented accuracy in the predictions than previously possible. We also evaluate our model on the real events detected by the LIGO–Virgo collaboration and find that our network correctly classifies all of them, consistent with non-detection of lensing.