No Arabic abstract
The recent completion of Advanced LIGO suggests that gravitational waves (GWs) may soon be directly observed. Past searches for gravitational-wave transients have been impacted by transient noise artifacts, known as glitches, introduced into LIGO data due to instrumental and environmental effects. In this work, we explore how waveform complexity, instead of signal-to-noise ratio, can be used to rank event candidates and distinguish short duration astrophysical signals from glitches. We test this framework using a new hierarchical pipeline that directly compares the Bayesian evidence of explicit signal and glitch models. The hierarchical pipeline is shown to have strong performance, and in particular, allows high-confidence detections of a range of waveforms at realistic signal-to-noise ratio with a two detector network.
We develop a general data-driven and template-free method for the extraction of event waveforms in the presence of background noise. Recent gravitational-wave observations provide one of the significant scientific areas requiring data analysis and waveform extraction capability. We use our method to find the waveforms for the reported events from the first, second, and third LIGO observation runs (O1, O2, and O3). Using the instantaneous frequencies derived by the Hilbert transform of the extracted waveforms, we provide the physical time delays between the arrivals of gravitational waves to the detectors.
A second generation of gravitational wave detectors will soon come online with the objective of measuring for the first time the tiny gravitational signal from the coalescence of black hole and/or neutron star binaries. In this communication, we propose a new time-frequency search method alternative to matched filtering techniques that are usually employed to detect this signal. This method relies on a graph that encodes the time evolution of the signal and its variability by establishing links between coefficients in the multi-scale time-frequency decomposition of the data. We provide a proof of concept for this approach.
We propose a new model of Bayesian Neural Networks to not only detect the events of compact binary coalescence in the observational data of gravitational waves (GW) but also identify the full length of the event duration including the inspiral stage. This is achieved by incorporating the Bayesian approach into the CLDNN classifier, which integrates together the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM). Our model successfully detect all seven BBH events in the LIGO Livingston O2 data, with the periods of their GW waveforms correctly labeled. The ability of a Bayesian approach for uncertainty estimation enables a newly defined `awareness state for recognizing the possible presence of signals of unknown types, which is otherwise rejected in a non-Bayesian model. Such data chunks labeled with the awareness state can then be further investigated rather than overlooked. Performance tests with 40,960 training samples against 512 chunks of 8-second real noise mixed with mock signals of various optimal signal-to-noise ratio $0 leq rho_text{opt} leq 18$ show that our model recognizes 90% of the events when $rho_text{opt} >7$ (100% when $rho_text{opt} >8.5$) and successfully labels more than 95% of the waveform periods when $rho_text{opt} >8$. The latency between the arrival of peak signal and generating an alert with the associated waveform period labeled is only about 20 seconds for an unoptimized code on a moderate GPU-equipped personal computer. This makes our model possible for nearly real-time detection and for forecasting the coalescence events when assisted with deeper training on a larger dataset using the state-of-art HPCs.
We present an improved method of targeting continuous gravitational-wave signals in data from the LIGO and Virgo detectors with a higher efficiency than the time-domain Bayesian pipeline used in many previous searches. Our spectral interpolation algorithm, SplInter, removes the intrinsic phase evolution of the signal from source rotation and relative detector motion. We do this in the frequency domain and generate a time series containing only variations in the signal due to the antenna pattern. Although less flexible than the classic heterodyne approach, SplInter allows for rapid analysis of putative signals from isolated (and some binary) pulsars, and efficient follow-up searches for candidate signals generated by other search methods. The computational saving over the heterodyne approach can be many orders of magnitude, up to a factor of around fifty thousand in some cases, with a minimal impact on overall sensitivity for most targets.
We describe detection methods for extensions of gravitational wave searches to sub-solar mass compact binaries. Sub-solar mass searches were previously carried out using Initial LIGO, and Advanced LIGO boasts a detection volume approximately 1000 times bigger than Initial LIGO at design sensitivity. Low masses present computational difficulties, and we suggest a way to rein in the increase while retaining a sensitivity much greater than previous searches. Sub-solar mass compact objects are of particular interest because they are not expected to form astrophysically. If detected they could be evidence of primordial black holes (PBH). We consider a particular model of PBH binary formation that would allow LIGO/Virgo to place constraints on this population within the context of dark matter, and we demonstrate how to obtain conservative bounds for the upper limit on the dark matter fraction.