An Unmodelled Bayesian Burst Search for Gravitational Waves
Abstract
The nonlinear memory effect is a theoretical consequence of General Relativity, first brought to attention by Demetrios Christodoulou in 1991 and later elaborated on by Kip Thorne in 1992. It is understood that there exists a low-frequency memory component, for all gravitational wave bursts, that is of the same order of magnitude as the original oscillatory burst but of different spectral content. Orphan memory is defined as a memory signal for which there is no detectable oscillatory counterpart. By making use of the novel parameter estimation software `Bilby', we provide the first unmodelled burst search method for recovering an orphan memory signal's phenomenological parameters using parameter estimation with Bayesian inference. We show that, if a memory-like signal does exist within LIGO's data, then our analysis has the full capability of detecting it with statistical significance. For future projects we plan to generalize and implement this as a pipeline for the low-frequency memory component, falling within LIGO's sensitivity bandwidth, arising from unmodelled high-frequency gravitational wave bursts, such as from cosmic strings interactions.
Australian Academy of Science LIGO Scientific Collaboration.- Publication:
-
APS April Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019APS..APRT16008D