Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published August 7, 2009 | public
Journal Article

Enhancing the capabilities of LIGO time–frequency plane searches through clustering

Abstract

One class of gravitational wave signals LIGO is searching for consists of short duration bursts of unknown waveforms. Potential sources include core collapse supernovae, gamma ray burst progenitors and mergers of binary black holes or neutron stars. We present a density-based clustering algorithm to improve the performance of time–frequency searches for such gravitational-wave bursts when they are extended in time and/or frequency, and not sufficiently well known to permit matched filtering. We have implemented this algorithm as an extension to the QPipeline, a gravitational-wave data analysis pipeline for the detection of bursts, which currently determines the statistical significance of events based solely on the peak significance observed in minimum uncertainty regions of the time–frequency plane. Density-based clustering improves the performance of such a search by considering the aggregate significance of arbitrarily shaped regions in the time–frequency plane and rejecting the isolated minimum uncertainty features expected from the background detector noise. In this paper, we present test results for simulated signals and demonstrate that density-based clustering improves the performance of the QPipeline for signals extended in time and/or frequency.

Additional Information

Copyright © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Limited 2009. Received 12 December 2008, in final form 9 June 2009 Published 10 July 2009. Print publication: Issue 15 (7 August 2009). The authors are grateful for the support of the United States National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement PHY-04-57528, California Institute of Technology, and Columbia University in the city of New York. We are grateful to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for their support. We are indebted to many of our colleagues for frequent and fruitful discussion. In particular, we would like to thank Albert Lazzarini for his valuable suggestions regarding this project, and Luca Matone, Zsuzsa Márka, Sharmila Kamat, Jameson Rollins, Peter Kalmus, John Dwyer, Patrick Sutton, Eirini Messeritaki and Szabolcs Márka for their thoughtful comments on the paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge the LIGO Scientific Collaboration hardware injection team for providing the data used in figures 1 and 2. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of all the software developers and programmers in the broader scientific community without whose incremental achievements over many decades we would not be able to reach this point where implementing this project has become possible. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the research by these agencies and by the Australian Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Department of Science and Technology of India, the Spanish Ministerio de Educaciony Ciencia, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Research Corporation, and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. The LIGO Observatories were constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement PHY-9210038. The LIGO Laboratory operates under cooperative agreement PHY-0107417. This document has been assigned LIGO document number LIGO-P070041-01-Z.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023