Chennai Mathematical Institute

Seminars




2.00 p.m.
Fishing gravitational wave chirps with a multi-detector network

Archana Pai
Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam, Germany.
09-01-09


Abstract

A worldwide network of highly sensitive optical interferometers attempts to confirm the existence of gravitational waves through direct observation. Such an evidence could arise from modeled sources like compact coalescing binary stars as well as unmodeled/unknown sources. Standard data analysis techniques exist to fetch known/modeled signals from the noisy data. However, detection of an unmodeled and weak signal is a challenging task due to limited information. In this talk, we discuss the Best network chirplet-chain algorithm designed to detect unmodeled and arbitrary gravitational wave chirps with a network of detectors. It is a time-frequency based search scheme which efficiently maps the search over a large number of smooth chirps into a longest path problem in the combined discrete Wigner-Ville map of the data projected on gravitational wave beamformers.