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.
Recommended Citation
Usman, Samantha, "An Improved Pipeline to Search for Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Coalescence" (2016). Honors Capstone Projects - All. 929.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/929
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
