Michele's wiki/blog

Authors: J. Clark, I.S. Heng, M. Pitkin, G. Woan

Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007

Abstract: The excitation of quadrupolar quasi-normal modes in a neutron star leads to the emission of a short, distinctive, burst of gravitational radiation in the form of a decaying sinusoid or ‘ring-down’. We present a Bayesian analysis method which incorporates relevant prior information about the source and known instrumental artifacts to conduct a robust search for the gravitational wave emission associated with pulsar glitches and soft $\gamma$-ray repeater flares. Instrumental transients are modelled as sine-Gaussian and their evidence, or marginal likelihood, is compared with that of Gaussian white noise and ring-downs via the ‘odds-ratio’. Tests using simulated data with a noise spectral density similar to the LIGO interferometer around 1 kHz yield 50% detection efficiency and 1% false alarm probability for ring-down signals with signal-to-noise ratio $\rho=5.5$. For a source at 15 kpc this requires an energy of $2.8\times 10ˆ{-5}M_{\astrosun}cˆ2$ to be emitted as gravitational waves.

abs pdf