Identifying Microlensing by Compact Dark Matter through Diffraction Patterns in Gravitational Waves with Machine Learning (2509.04538v1)

Abstract: Gravitational wave lensing, particularly microlensing by compact dark matter (DM), offers a unique avenue to probe the nature of dark matter. However, conventional detection methods are often computationally expensive, inefficient, and sensitive to waveform systematics. In this work, we introduce the Wavelet Convolution Detector (WCD), a deep learning framework specifically designed to identify wave-optics diffraction patterns imprinted in gravitationally lensed signals. The WCD integrates multi-scale wavelet analysis within residual convolutional blocks to efficiently extract time-frequency interference structures, and is trained on a realistically generated dataset incorporating compact DM mass functions and astrophysical lensing probabilities. This work is the first machine learning-based approach capable of identifying such wave-optics signatures in lensed gravitational waves. Tested on simulated binary black hole events, the model achieves 92.2\% accuracy (AUC=0.965), with performance rising to AUC$\sim$0.99 at high SNR. Crucially, it maintains high discriminative power across a wide range of lens masses without retraining, demonstrating particular strength in the low-impact-parameter and high-lens-mass regimes where wave-optics effects are most pronounced. Compared to Bayesian inference, the WCD provides orders-of-magnitude faster inference, making it a scalable and efficient tool for discovering compact DM through lensed gravitational waves in the era of third-generation detectors.