Accelerating Tests of General Relativity with Gravitational-Wave Signals using Hybrid Sampling

The Advanced LIGO/Virgo interferometers have observed ~100 gravitational-wave transients

enabling new questions to be answered about relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology. However, many

of our current procedures for computing these constraints will not scale well with the increased size of

future transient catalogs. We introduce a novel hybrid sampling method in order to more efficiently

perform parameterized tests of general relativity with gravitational-wave signals. Applying our

method to the binary black hole merger GW150914 and simulated signals we find that our method

is approximately an order of magnitude more efficient than the current method with conservative

settings for our hybrid analysis. While we have focused on the specific problem of measuring

potential deviations from relativity, our method is of much wider applicability to any problem that

can be decomposed into a simple and more complex model(s).