Rapid method for preliminary identification of subthreshold strongly lensed counterparts to superthreshold gravitational-wave events

(Received accepted published January 2024) Gravitational waves (GWs) from stellar-mass compact binary coalescences (CBCs) are expected to be strongly lensed when encountering large agglomerations of matter, such as galaxies or clusters. Searches for strongly lensed GWs have been conducted using data from the first three observing runs of the LIGO-Virgo GW detector network. Although no confirmed detections have been reported, interesting candidate lensed pairs have been identified. In this work, we delineate a preliminary analysis that rapidly identifies pairs to be further analyzed by more sophisticated Bayesian parameter estimation (PE) methods. The analysis relies on the Gaussian/Fisher approximation to the likelihood and compares the corresponding approximate posteriors on the chirp masses of the candidate pair. It additionally cross-correlates the rapidly produced localization sky areas (constructed by Bayestar sky-localization software). The analysis was used to identify pairs involving counterparts from targeted subthreshold searches to confidently detected superthreshold CBC events. The most significant candidate "super-sub" pair deemed by this analysis was subsequently found, by more sophisticated and detailed joint-PE analyses, to be among the more significant candidate pairs, but not sufficiently significant to suggest the observation of a lensed event [J. Janquart et al., Follow-up analyses to the O3 LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA lensing searches, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 526, 3 (2023)].