Reconstruction of source location in a network of gravitational wave interferometric detectors

Abstract

Accepted in Phys. Rev. D - Accepted in Phys. Rev. DThis paper deals with the reconstruction of the direction of a gravitational wave source using the detection made by a network of interferometric detectors, mainly the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We suppose that an event has been seen in coincidence using a filter applied on the three detector data streams. Using the arrival time (and its associated error) of the gravitational signal in each detector, the direction of the source in the sky is computed using a chi^2 minimization technique. For reasonably large signals (SNR>4.5 in all detectors), the mean angular error between the real location and the reconstructed one is about 1 degree. We also investigate the effect of the network geometry assuming the same angular response for all interferometric detectors. It appears that the reconstruction quality is not uniform over the sky and is degraded when the source approaches the plane defined by the three detectors. Adding at least one other detector to the LIGO-Virgo network reduces the blind regions and in the case of 6 detectors, a precision less than 1 degree on the source direction can be reached for 99% of the sky

Reconstructing the sky location of gravitational-wave detected compact binary systems: Methodology for testing and comparison

“…(4) and (13). For a given model assumption and data realization, there is an exact PDF of which the algorithms produce an approximation.…”

“…For this reason the problem of reconstructing the sky position of GW sources with the network of ground-based laser interferometers is an area of active work in preparation for advanced instruments [13][14][15][16][17][18]. By the end of observations with instruments in initial configuration, two main implementations had been used to determine the sky localization uncertainty region of a coalescing binary candidate [8,9]:…”

Localization of binary neutron star mergers with second and third generation gravitational-wave detectors

“…Previous estimates of network localization errors largely fall into two distinct categories: the first being analytical estimates that bypass the full task of parameter estimation and reduce the parameter space by focusing primarily on source localization [51,58,77,[79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88]; the second being full parameter estimation studies that extract detailed parameter estimates using Bayesian statistics [59,[89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96]. Performing the full analysis has the advantage of being more accurate, but due to the computational cost the number of sources that can be considered is typically small.…”

Gravitational wave source localization for eccentric binary coalesce with a ground-based detector network

“…But for ground-based detectors, their positions change very little bit within the gravitational wave signal time scale. In order to localize the gravitational wave sources for LIGO type detectors, people usually use a network of detectors [16,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Among a detectors network, the signal reaching time is different.…”