LENSINGGW: a PYTHON package for lensing of gravitational waves

Abstract

Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo might be able to observe the first lensed gravitational waves in the coming years. With the addition of the KAGRA and LIGO India detectors to the detector network and with the future construction of the Einstein Telescope we might be able to observe hundreds of lensed events. Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors can resolve arrival-time differences on the order of the inverse of the observed frequencies. The LIGO and Virgo frequency band spans from a few Hz to a few kHz, therefore the typical time resolution of current interferometers is on the order of milliseconds. When microlenses are embedded in galaxies or galaxy clusters, lensing can become more prominent and result in observable time delays at LIGO and Virgo frequencies. Therefore, gravitational waves might offer an exciting alternative probe of microlensing. However, only a few lensing configurations have currently been worked out in the context of gravitational-wave lensing. In this paper, we present lensingGW, a Python package designed to handle both strong lensing and microlensing of compact binaries and the related gravitational-wave signals in the geometrical optics limit. This synergy paves the way for systematic parameter space investigations and for the detection of arbitrary lens configurations and compact sources. Here we focus on the LIGO and Virgo frequencies. We demonstrate the working mechanism of lensingGW and its use in studying microlenses that are embedded in galaxies.