The list of putative sources of gravitational waves possibly detected by the ongoing worldwide network of large scale interferometers has been continuously growing in the last years. For some of them, the detection is made difficult by the lack of a complete information about the expected signal. We concentrate on the case where the expected GW is a quasi-periodic frequency modulated signal i.e., a chirp. In this article, we address the question of detecting an a priori unknown GW chirp. We introduce a general chirp model and claim that it includes all physically realistic GW chirps. We produce a finite grid of template waveforms which samples the resulting set of possible chirps. If we follow the classical approach (used for the detection of inspiralling binary chirps, for instance), we would build a bank of quadrature matched filters comparing the data to each of the templates of this grid. The detection would then be achieved by thresholding the output, the maximum giving the individual which best fits the data. In the present case, this exhaustive search is not tractable because of the very large number of templates in the grid. We show that the exhaustive search can be reformulated (using approximations) as a pattern search in the time-frequency plane. This motivates an approximate but feasible alternative solution which is clearly linked to the optimal one. [abridged version of the abstract]
A method is described for the detection and estimation of transient chirp signals that are characterized by smoothly evolving, but otherwise unmodeled, amplitude envelopes and instantaneous frequencies. Such signals are particularly relevant for gravitational wave searches, where they may arise in a wide range of astrophysical scenarios. The method uses splines with continuously adjustable breakpoints to represent the amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency of a signal, and estimates them from noisy data using penalized least squares and model selection. Simulations based on waveforms spanning a wide morphological range show that the method performs well in a signal-to-noise ratio regime where the time-frequency signature of a signal is highly degraded, thereby extending the coverage of current unmodeled gravitational wave searches to a wider class of signals.
The final inspiral phase in the evolution of a compact binary consisting of black holes and/or neutron stars is among the most probable events that a network of ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors is likely to observe. Gravitational radiation emitted during this phase will have to be dug out of noise by matched-filtering (correlating) the detector output with a bank of several $10^5$ templates, making the computational resources required quite demanding, though not formidable. We propose an interpolation method for evaluating the correlation between template waveforms and the detector output and show that the method is effective in substantially reducing the number of templates required. Indeed, the number of templates needed could be a factor $sim 4$ smaller than required by the usual approach, when the minimal overlap between the template bank and an arbitrary signal (the so-called {it minimal match}) is 0.97. The method is amenable to easy implementation, and the various detector projects might benefit by adopting it to reduce the computational costs of inspiraling neutron star and black hole binary search.
We estimate the probability of detecting a gravitational wave signal from coalescing compact binaries in simulated data from a ground-based interferometer detector of gravitational radiation using Bayesian model selection. The simulated waveform of the chirp signal is assumed to be a spin-less Post-Newtonian (PN) waveform of a given expansion order, while the searching template is assumed to be either of the same Post-Newtonian family as the simulated signal or one level below its Post-Newtonian expansion order. Within the Bayesian framework, and by applying a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation algorithm, we compare PN1.5 vs. PN2.0 and PN3.0 vs. PN3.5 wave forms by deriving the detection probabilities, the statistical uncertainties due to noise as a function of the SNR, and the posterior distributions of the parameters. Our analysis indicates that the detection probabilities are not compromised when simplified models are used for the comparison, while the accuracies in the determination of the parameters characterizing these signals can be significantly worsened, no matter what the considered Post-Newtonian order expansion comparison is.
We propose a class of displacement- and laser-noise free gravitational-wave-interferometer configurations, which does not sense non-geodesic mirror motions and laser noises, but provides non-vanishing gravitational-wave signal. Our interferometer consists of 4 mirrors and 2 beamsplitters, which form 4 Mach-Zehnder interferometers. By contrast to previous works, no composite mirrors are required. Each mirror in our configuration is sensed redundantly, by at least two pairs of incident and reflected beams. Displacement- and laser-noise free detection is achieved when output signals from these 4 interferometers are combined appropriately. Our 3-dimensional interferometer configuration has a low-frequency response proportional to f^2, which is better than the f^3 achievable by previous 2-dimensional configurations.