Gravitational-wave astronomy with a physical calibration model

Approaches to incorporating detector calibration uncertainty in gravitational-wave source parameter estimation have previously relied on upper limits or approximations. Additionally, in the context of compact binary signals, the calibration approximations inefficiently added in excess of 20 parameters to the calculation. Instead, we developed a post-processing approach, relying on a technique known as importance sampling. The method addresses two concerns - it both incorporates a physical model for the uncertainty in the LIGO detectors' response functions, and removes the additional computation cost associated with these models. With our approach, we demonstrate the procedure for a number of observed gravitational-wave signals, as well as a simulated set of binary black hole mergers. Within our simulated analyses, we find that the impact of calibration uncertainty is negligible. For a loud GW150914-like signal with a signal-to-noise ratio of 200, calibration uncertainty only marginally impacts the inferred luminosity distance, and increases uncertainty in the localization of the source by a factor of two. Finally, this approach has been used to address these aforementioned computational challenges in the third gravitational-wave transient catalog released by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA Scientific Collaborations.