Michele's wiki/blog

Authors: Neil J. Cornish, Edward K. Porter

Date: Fri, 26 May 2006

Abstract: The gravitational wave signals from coalescing Supermassive Black Hole Binaries are one of the prime targets for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). With optimal data processing techniques the LISA observatory should be able to detect these black hole mergers anywhere in the Universe. The challenge is to find ways to dig the signals out of a combination of instrument noise and the large foreground from stellar mass binaries in our own galaxy. The standard procedure of matched filtering against a bank of templates can be computationally prohibitive, especially when the black holes are spinning or the mass ratio is large. Here we develop an alternative approach based on annealed Markov Chains that is orders of magnitude cheaper than a grid search. We demonstrate our approach on a simulated LISA data stream that contains the signal from a binary system of Schwarzschild Black Holes, embedded in instrument noise and a foreground containing 26 million galactic binaries. The annealed chains are able to accurately recover the 9 parameters that describe the black hole binary without first having to remove any of the bright sources in the foreground.

abs pdf