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Gravitational waves from coalescing binaries: A hierarchical signal detection strategy. (English) Zbl 0960.94010
Królak, Andrzej (ed.), Mathematics of gravitation. Part II: Gravitational wave detection. Proceedings of the workshop on mathematical aspects of theories of gravitation, Warsaw, Poland, February 29-March 30, 1996. Warszawa: Polish Academy of Sciences, Inst. of Mathematics, Banach Cent. Publ. 41(pt.2), 221-233 (1997).
Summary: The detection of gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries would be a computationally intensive process if a single bank of template waveforms (i.e., a one step search) is used. We present, in this paper, an alternative method which is a hierarchical search strategy involving two template banks. We show that the computational power required by such a two step search, for an on-line detection of the one parameter family of Newtonian signals, is $$1/8$$ of that required when an on-line one step search is used. This reduction is achieved when signals having a strength of $$\sim 8.8$$ times the noise r.m.s. value are required to be detected with a probability of $$\sim 0.95$$ while allowing for not more than one false event per year on the average. We present approximate formulae for the detection probability of a signal and the false alarm probability. Our numerical results are specific to the noise power spectral density expected for the initial LIGO.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 0872.00039].
##### MSC:
 94A13 Detection theory in information and communication theory 83C35 Gravitational waves
##### Keywords:
detection of gravitational waves
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