2018/05/03 by Tom McClain, McClain, Tom · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #astro-ph.IM #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1805.01309
13 pages, 2 figures, to appear in European Physical Journal Plus
arxiv created 2018/05/03 · arxiv updated 2018/05/04
I explore the possibility of resurrecting an old, non-Bayesian computational approach for inferring the source direction of a gravitational wave from the output of a two-detector network. The method gives the beam pattern response functions and time delay, and performs well even in the presence of noise and unexpected signal forms. I further suggest an improvement to this method in the form of a weighting algorithm that usefully improves its accuracy beyond what can be achieved with simple best-fit methods, validating the new procedure with several small-scale simulations. The approach is identified as complimentary to -- rather than in competition with -- the now-standard Bayesian approach typically used by the LIGO network in parameter determination. Finally, I briefly discuss the possible applications of this method in the world of three-or-more detector networks and some directions for future work.