Detection of GW bursts with chirplet-like template families

Éric Chassande-Mottin (1) , Miriam Miele (2, 3) , Satya Mohapatra (4) , Laura Cadonati (4)

1 APC-Gravitation - APC - Gravitation
2 APC (UMR_7164) - AstroParticule et Cosmologie
3 University of Sannio
4 Physics Department

Gravitational Wave (GW) burst detection algorithms typically rely on the hypothesis that the burst signal is " locally stationary ", that is it changes slowly with frequency. Under this assumption, the signal can be decomposed into a small number of wavelets with constant frequency. This justifies the use of a family of sine-Gaussian wavelets in the Omega pipeline, one of the algorithms used in LIGO-Virgo burst searches. However there are plausible scenarios where the burst frequency evolves rapidly, such as in the merger phase of a binary black hole and/or neutron star coalescence. In those cases, the local stationarity of sine-Gaussians induces performance losses, due to the mismatch between the template and the actual signal. We propose an extension of the Omega pipeline based on chirplet-like templates. Chirplets incorporate an additional parameter, the chirp rate, to control the frequency variation. In this paper, we show that the Omega pipeline can easily be extended to include a chirplet template bank. We illustrate the method on a simulated data set, with a family of phenomenological binary black-hole coalescence waveforms embedded into Gaussian LIGO/Virgo-like noise. Chirplet-like templates result in an enhancement of the measured signal-to-noise ratio.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences; Physical Sciences

Domaines: Relativité Générale et Cosmologie Quantique [gr-qc]

Éric Chassande-Mottin, Miriam Miele, Satya Mohapatra, Laura Cadonati. Detection of GW bursts with chirplet-like template families. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 2010, 27 (19), pp.194017. ⟨10.1088/0264-9381/27/19/194017⟩. ⟨hal-00629971⟩