Understanding the LIGO GW150914 event

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 $6-7\sigma$ with a temporal displacement of $\tau =6.9\pm 0.4$ms. We have also identified a few events that are morphologically close to GW150914 but less strongly cross correlated with it.

10 figures

References in corpus (3)

• GW151226: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence
• The Sensitivity of the Advanced LIGO Detectors at the Beginning of Gravitational Wave Astronomy
• Model-Based Cross-Correlation Search for Gravitational Waves from Scorpius X-1

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Degeneracy of gravitational waveforms in the context of GW150914
• An independent search of gravitational waves in the first observation run of advanced LIGO using cross-correlation
• Looking for ancillary signals around GW150914
• Convenient filtering techniques for LIGO strain of the GW150914 event