English

Understanding the LIGO GW150914 event

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2016-08-24 v2 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We present a simplified method for the extraction of meaningful signals from Hanford and Livingstone 32 seconds data for the GW150914 event made publicly available by the LIGO collaboration and demonstrate its ability to reproduce the LIGO collaboration's own results quantitatively given the assumption that all narrow peaks in the power spectrum are a consequence of physically uninteresting signals and can be removed. After the clipping of these peaks and return to the time domain, the GW150914 event is readily distinguished from broadband background noise. This simple technique allows us to identify the GW150914 event without any assumption regarding its physical origin and with minimal assumptions regarding its shape. We also confirm that the LIGO GW150914 event is uniquely correlated in the Hanford and Livingston detectors for 4096 second data at the level of 67σ6-7\,\sigma with a temporal displacement of τ=6.9±0.4\tau=6.9 \pm 0.4\,ms. We have also identified a few events that are morphologically close to GW150914 but less strongly cross correlated with it.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1604.06211,
  title  = {Understanding the LIGO GW150914 event},
  author = {P. Naselsky and A. D. Jackson and Hao Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.06211},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:37:32.892Z