On the search for intermediate duration gravitational waves using the spherical harmonic basis

The main focus of the work described here within, is the development of an analysis pipeline that can detect gravitational waves transients that have a duration from a large fraction of a second up to 100 seconds. Firstly, we will present the basic theory of gravitational waves, their generation and...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Edwards, Mark
Published: Cardiff University 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.585314
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Summary:The main focus of the work described here within, is the development of an analysis pipeline that can detect gravitational waves transients that have a duration from a large fraction of a second up to 100 seconds. Firstly, we will present the basic theory of gravitational waves, their generation and their detection. We will then review the current state of the art of gravitational waves transient search algorithms and their limitations. We also introduce the coherent search pipeline that has been developed from the ground up to find such intermediate length gravitational waves, and discuss in detail how it differs from other pipelines, and what makes it so well suited to this task. Further, we will describe the powerful glitch rejection algorithm and sky localisation solution that using the spherical harmonic basis made possible. Finally, we demonstrate the use of this method on real data, and compare our results against a mature pipeline.