Long gravitational-wave transients and associated detection strategies for a network of terrestrial interferometers

Dec, 2010
24 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 83 (2011) 083004
e-Print:

Citations per year

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Abstract: (arXiv)
Searches for gravitational waves (GWs) traditionally focus on persistent sources (e.g., pulsars or the stochastic background) or on transients sources (e.g., compact binary inspirals or core-collapse supernovae), which last for timescales of milliseconds to seconds. We explore the possibility of long GW transients with unknown waveforms lasting from many seconds to weeks. We propose a novel analysis technique to bridge the gap between short O(s) burst analyses and persistent stochastic analyses. Our technique utilizes frequency-time maps of GW strain cross-power between two spatially separated terrestrial GW detectors. The application of our cross-power statistic to searches for GW transients is framed as a pattern recognition problem, and we discuss several pattern-recognition techniques. We demonstrate these techniques by recovering simulated GW signals in simulated detector noise. We also recover environmental noise artifacts, thereby demonstrating a novel technique for the identification of such artifacts in GW interferometers. We compare the efficiency of this framework to other techniques such as matched filtering.
  • 95.55.Ym
  • 95.30.Sf
  • 95.85.Sz
  • background: stochastic
  • binary: compact
  • gravitational radiation: emission
  • interferometer: network
  • data analysis method
  • frequency: time dependence
  • supernova