Multibaseline gravitational wave radiometry
Abstract
We present a statistic for the detection of stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWBs) using radiometry with a network of multiple baselines. We also quantitatively compare the sensitivities of existing baselines and their network to SGWBs. We assess how the measurement accuracy of signal parameters, e.g., the sky position of a localized source, can improve when using a network of baselines, as compared to any of the single participating baselines. The search statistic itself is derived from the likelihood ratio of the cross correlation of the data across all possible baselines in a detector network and is optimal in Gaussian noise. Specifically, it is the likelihood ratio maximized over the strength of the SGWB and is called the maximized-likelihood ratio (MLR). One of the main advantages of using the MLR over past search strategies for inferring the presence or absence of a signal is that the former does not require the deconvolution of the cross correlation statistic. Therefore, it does not suffer from errors inherent to the deconvolution procedure and is especially useful for detecting weak sources. In the limit of a single baseline, it reduces to the detection statistic studied by Ballmer [Classical Quantum Gravity 23, S179 (2006).] and Mitra et al. [Phys. Rev. D 77, 042002 (2008).]. Unlike past studies, here the MLR statistic enables us to compare quantitatively the performances of a variety of baselines searching for a SGWB signal in (simulated) data. Although we use simulated noise and SGWB signals for making these comparisons, our method can be straight forwardly applied on real data.
Additional Information
© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 21 December 2010; published 4 March 2011. We thank Joe Romano, Stefan Ballmer, and Warren Anderson for discussions, careful reading of the manuscript, and helpful comments. We would also like to thank Bruce Allen, Sanjeev Dhurandhar, Albert Lazzarini, Vuk Mandic, Himan Mukhopadhyay, Alan Weinstein, and Holger Pletsch for helpful discussions. S. M. would like to acknowledge the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (France) for supporting part of the research. This work was supported in part by NSF Grant No. PHY-0855679. Part of the research described in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreement PHY-0757058.Attached Files
Published - Talukder2011p13072Phys_Rev_D.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 23103
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110324-142701424
- Centre National d'Études Spatiales (France)
- PHY-0855679
- NSF
- NASA
- PHY-0757058
- NSF
- Created
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2011-03-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field