Search strategies for long gravitational-wave transients: hidden Markov model tracking and seedless clustering

Abstract

A number of detections have been made in the past few years of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences. While there exist well-understood waveform models for signals from compact binary coalescences, many sources of gravitational waves are not well modeled, including potential long-transient signals from a binary neutron star post-merger remnant. Searching for these sources requires robust detection algorithms that make minimal assumptions about any potential signals. In this paper, we compare two unmodeled search schemes for long-transient gravitational waves, operating on cross-power spectrograms. One is an efficient algorithm first implemented for continuous wave searches, based on a hidden Markov model. The other is a seedless clustering method, which has been used in transient gravitational wave analysis in the past. We quantify the performance of both algorithms, including sensitivity and computational cost, by simulating synthetic signals with a special focus on sources like binary neutron star post-merger remnants. We demonstrate that the hidden Markov model tracking is a good option in model-agnostic searches for low signal-to-noise ratio signals. We also show that it can outperform the seedless method for certain categories of signals while also being computationally more efficient.

10 pages, 7 figures

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• Search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 with a hidden Markov model in O3 LIGO data
• Methods and prospects for gravitational wave searches targeting ultralight vector boson clouds around known black holes
• Applications of machine learning in gravitational wave research with current interferometric detectors
• Prospects for detecting transient quasi-monochromatic gravitational waves from glitching pulsars with current and future detectors
• Stochastic gravitational-wave background searches and constraints on neutron-star ellipticity
• Enabling multi-messenger astronomy with continuous gravitational waves: early warning and sky localization of binary neutron stars in Einstein Telescope
• Search for Postmerger Gravitational Waves from Binary Neutron Star Mergers Using a Matched-filtering Statistic
• Search for continuous gravitational waves from HESS~J1427-608 with a hidden Markov model
• Exposing Gravitational Waves below the Quantum Shot Noise
• Searching for continuous gravitational waves from highly deformed compact objects with DECIGO
• GFH-v2 Pipeline for Searches of Long-Transient Gravitational Waves from Newborn Magnetars
• BinaryGFH-v2: Improved method to search for gravitational waves from sub-solar-mass, ultra-compact binaries using the Generalized Frequency-Hough Transform
• Prospects for detecting asteroid-mass primordial black holes in extreme mass-ratio inspirals with continuous gravitational waves