TY - JOUR
T1 - Fortifying the characterization of binary mergers in LIGO data
AU - Littenberg, Tyson B.
AU - Coughlin, Michael
AU - Farr, Benjamin
AU - Farr, Will M.
PY - 2013/10/25
Y1 - 2013/10/25
N2 - The study of compact binary inspirals and mergers with gravitational wave observatories amounts to optimizing a theoretical description of the data to best reproduce the true detector output. While most of the research effort in gravitational wave data modeling focuses on the gravitational waveforms themselves, here we will begin to improve our model of the instrument noise by introducing parameters that allow us to determine the background instrumental power spectrum while simultaneously characterizing the astrophysical signal. We use data from the fifth LIGO science run and simulated gravitational wave signals to demonstrate how the introduction of noise parameters results in the resilience of the signal characterization to variations in an initial estimation of the noise power spectral density. We find substantial improvement in the consistency of Bayes factor calculations when we are able to marginalize over uncertainty in the instrument noise level.
AB - The study of compact binary inspirals and mergers with gravitational wave observatories amounts to optimizing a theoretical description of the data to best reproduce the true detector output. While most of the research effort in gravitational wave data modeling focuses on the gravitational waveforms themselves, here we will begin to improve our model of the instrument noise by introducing parameters that allow us to determine the background instrumental power spectrum while simultaneously characterizing the astrophysical signal. We use data from the fifth LIGO science run and simulated gravitational wave signals to demonstrate how the introduction of noise parameters results in the resilience of the signal characterization to variations in an initial estimation of the noise power spectral density. We find substantial improvement in the consistency of Bayes factor calculations when we are able to marginalize over uncertainty in the instrument noise level.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.88.084044
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.88.084044
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84887108115
SN - 1550-7998
VL - 88
JO - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
JF - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
IS - 8
M1 - 084044
ER -