Bound Volume Number

Volume IV

Degree Type

Honors Capstone Project

Date of Submission

Spring 5-2016

Capstone Advisor

Duncan Brown

Capstone Major

Physics

Capstone College

Arts and Science

Audio/Visual Component

no

Keywords

PyCBC

Capstone Prize Winner

yes

Won Capstone Funding

no

Honors Categories

Sciences and Engineering

Subject Categories

Physics

Abstract

We describe the search pipeline, called PyCBC , used to identify gravitational wave candidates in Advanced LIGO's O1 search. We give an overall summary of the pipeline including a general layout and the methods for calculating the signal-to-noise ratio and the chi-squared statistic. We then give detailed explanations of removing noise transient before processing, called gating ; the way to create a bank of template waveforms and the process of matched filtering these waveforms against the data; the chi-squared statistic's role in eliminating noise transients; the latest coincidence testing method, which requires candidates to be both nearly simultaneous and have the exact same parameters; and the method of translating a candidate's significance into a probability of being a true signal. We compare this pipeline to the one used in Initial LIGO's fifth and sixth science runs and report a 40% increase in sensitive volume with no significant change to computational cost.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Included in

Physics Commons

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