Simulating the Impacts of Systematic Calibration Uncertainty on Gravitational Wave Detector Astrophysical Sensitivity

Gravitational wave detectors offer a new window into a variety of astrophysical phenomena, but their use hinges on accurate characterization of the response of the detector. Calibration pipelines model the detector control systems for the LIGO and Virgo detectors, allowing the reconstruction of the strain from the measured responses, but this reconstructed strain contains residual statistical and systematic uncertainties. Deviation of the observed strain from the true strain alters the apparent sensitivity of the detector, which in turn affects the hypervolume for which the detector network is sensitive. This hypervolume is combined with the observed astrophysical signals to determine the rate of coalescence events, and so the uncertainty within calibration models propagates to uncertainty in these rates. In the recent LIGO/Virgo observing run, this uncertainty in the sensitive hypervolume was crudely bounded at ⪅10%. Implementing a model of calibration uncertainty into standard analysis tools, we provide a simulation to provide a more accurate estimate of sensitive hypervolume uncertainty, and constrain it to be substantially less than 1%.