Strategies and goals for stochastic gravitational wave background searches with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo

Abstract

The Advanced LIGO detectors commenced observations in September of 2015, while Advanced Virgo will come on-line in 2016. They will approach their target sensitivities over the subsequent years. A major goal for LIGO and Virgo will be to detect or set limits on a stochastic background of gravitational waves. A stochastic background of gravitational waves is expected to arise from a superposition of a large number of unresolved cosmological and/or astrophysical sources. A cosmologically produced background would carry unique signatures from the earliest epochs in the evolution of the Universe. Similarly, an astrophysical background would provide information about the astrophysical sources that generated it. LIGO and Virgo observations should be able to probe interesting regions of parameter space for these models. Presented here is an outline of LIGO and Virgo's search strategies for these signals. Also discussed is how global electromagnetic noise (from the Schumann resonances) could affect this search; possible strategies to monitor and subtract this potential source of correlated noise in a the global detector network are explained.