Soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars are thought to be neutron stars with strong magnetic fields, called magnetars, which emit intermittent bursts of hard X-rays and soft gamma rays. Three highly energetic bursts, known as giant flares, have been observed originating from three different SGRs, the latest and most energetic of which occurred on December 27, 2004, from the SGR with the largest estimated magnetic field, SGR 1806-20. Modulations in the X-ray tails of giant flares may be caused by global seismic oscillations. Non-radial oscillations of the dense neutron star matter could emit gravitational waves powered by the magnetar's magnetic energy reservoir. This analysis searched for long-duration transient gravitational waves associated with three magnetar bursts that occurred during LIGO's sixth science run, from July 7, 2009 to October 20, 2010. The search results were consistent with the calculated background, and 90% confidence upper limits on the possible undetected gravitational wave energy were found.

The first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, and the multiple detections that followed ushered in the era of gravitational-wave astronomy. With these developments, the focus of the gravitational-wave community shifted from detection to precision measurement, requiring a factor of ten improvement in calibration accuracy to maximize the astrophysical information that can be extracted from these detected signals. This dissertation discusses the implementation and characterization of a radiation-pressure-based calibration system called the Photon calibrator that is used as the primary calibration reference for the Advanced LIGO detectors. It also discusses the techniques and procedures used to realize sub-percent accuracy calibration of absolute displacement fiducials introduced using the Photon calibrator system during Advanced LIGO’s first and second observing runs. Using the Photon calibrator systems, frequency dependent calibration of the interferometer responses was achieved at the level of 2-3% in magnitude and 3- 5 degrees in phase across the LIGO detection band. This level of calibration accuracy has already played a significant role in extracting astrophysical parameters from LIGO’s detections. With the LIGO and Virgo detectors operating at design sensitivity, updated rate estimates indicate that measurement of the Hubble constant with gravitational waves with 1% accuracy will be possible within the next decade. This will require absolute amplitude calibration of the detectors at the sub-1% level. This dissertation also discusses the improvements that have been implemented in the Photon calibrator systems that will reduce the uncertainty in absolute displacement to below 0.5%. The gravitational waves from the post-merger phase of binary neutron stars are expected to contain interesting features at frequencies up to few kHz, carrying rich information about neutron-star astrophysics. This dissertation discusses the calibration errors introduced by test mass deformations caused by calibration forces at frequencies above 1 kHz. The errors, estimated using Finite Element Analysis, is in reasonable agreement with measurement results in the 1 to 5 kHz band. These investigations have enabled the reduction of calibration uncertainty at these frequencies, which should enhance our ability to decipher the neutron star astrophysics encoded in the gravitational wave signals from the post-merger phase. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.

In his theory of General Relativity, Einstein describes gravity as a geometric property of spacetime, which deforms in the presence of mass and energy. The accelerated motion of masses produces deformations, which propagate outward from their source at the speed of light. We refer to these radiated deformations as gravitational waves. Over the past several decades, the goal of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has been the search for direct evidence of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources, using ground based laser interferometers. As LIGO moves into its Advanced era (aLIGO), the direct detection of gravitational waves is inevitable. With the technology at hand, it is imperative that we have the tools to analyze the detector signal and examine the interesting astrophysical properties of the source. Some of the main targets of this search are coalescing compact binaries. In this thesis, I describe and evaluate bhextractor, a data analysis algorithm that uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify the main features of a set of gravitational waveforms produced by the coalescence of two black holes. Binary Black Hole (BBH) systems are expected to be among the most common sources of gravitational waves in the sensitivity band of aLIGO. However, the gravitational waveforms emitted by BBH systems are not well modeled and require computationally expensive Numerical Relativity (NR) simulations. bhextractor uses PCA to decompose a catalog of available NR waveforms into a set of orthogonal Principal Components (PCs), which efficiently select the major common features of the waveforms in the catalog and represent a portion of the BBH parameter space. From these PCs, we can reconstruct any waveform in the catalog, and construct new waveforms with similar properties. Using Bayesian analysis and Nested Sampling, one can use bhextractor to classify an arbitrary BBH waveform into one of the available catalogs and estimate the parameters of the gravitational wave source.

L'ère de l'astronomie gravitationnelle a commencé avec la première détection d'une onde gravitationnelle le 14 septembre 2015, par la collaboration LIGO-Virgo. Les premières détections proviennent de coalescences de trous noirs de quelques dizaines de masses solaires. Le détecteur européen Advanced Virgo a redémarré en 2017 pour participer aux prochaines détections d'ondes gravitationnelles et localiser les sources astrophysiques.Cette thèse a pour sujet les différentes étapes du processus de détection des ondes gravitationnelles : de l'étalonnage du détecteur Advanced Virgo à l'analyse en temps réel des données du réseau d'interféromètres LIGO-Virgo. Dans un premier temps, les objectifs, la méthode et les résultats de l'étalonnage du détecteur Advanced Virgo sont décrits. Cette étape est cruciale pour comprendre la sensibilité du détecteur et pour reconstruire l'amplitude de l'onde gravitationnelle. Un nouvel algorithme, SilenteC, développé pendant la thèse est ensuite détaillé : son objectif est d'identifier les sources de bruits non-stationnaires qui limitent la sensibilité des analyses. Certains bruits transitoires interviennent de façon non-linéaire et SilenteC tente de repérer ce type de contribution. Enfin, l'analyse MBTA à faible latence pour la recherche des signaux d'ondes gravitationnelles issus de coalescences de binaires compactes est décrite. En particulier, l'accent est mis sur la caractérisation de vétos permettant de distinguer les signaux astrophysiques à sélectionner et les bruits transitoires à rejeter le plus efficacement possible. / The era of gravitational astronomy began with the first detection of a gravitational wave on September 14, 2015, by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration. The first detections come from coalescences of black holes with masses of a few tens of solar masses. The European detector Advanced Virgo restarted in 2017 to participate in the next detections of gravitational waves and to locate the astrophysical sources.This thesis deals with the different stages of the gravitational waves detection process: from the calibration of the Advanced Virgo detector to low-latency analysis of the LIGO-Virgo interferometer network data. First, the objectives, method and results of the detector calibration are described. This step is crucial for understanding the sensitivity of the detector and for reconstructing the amplitude of the gravitational wave. A new algorithm, SilenteC, developed during the thesis is then detailed: its objective is to identify the sources of non-stationary noises that limit the sensitivity of the analysis. Some transient noises are non-linear and SilenteC tries to identify this type of contribution. Finally, low-latency MBTA analysis for the detection of gravitational wave signals from compact binary coalescences is described. In particular, emphasis is put on the study of vetos making it possible to distinguish the astrophysical signals to be selected and the transient noises to be rejected as efficiently as possible.

Cette thèse présente les résultats de la recherche de signaux d'ondes gravitationnelles transitoires de longue durée dans les données des deux premiers runs d'observation des détecteurs advanced LIGO et advanced Virgo. Ces ondes sont principalement émises par des étoiles à neutrons ou des trous noirs impliqués dans des phénomènes violents. Pour certaines sources, une modélisation impliquant une dynamique complexe et des instabilités hydrodynamiques peut prédire grossièrement la forme d'onde. Mais de manière générale, seulement l'information approximative sur la durée et la bande de fréquence est utilisée pour définir les limites de l'espace des paramètres de la recherche. Une méthode d'analyse temps-fréquence robuste aux incertitudes de la modélisation des signaux a donc été développé. En combinant les données de deux détecteurs de façon cohérente, la méthode permet de différencier les signaux recherchés du bruit de fond non gaussien des détecteurs. En l'absence de détection, nous avons placé des limites supérieures sur l'énergie émise et le taux attendu pour ces sources. Une recherche du signal attendu après la fusion de deux étoiles à neutrons observé en août 2017 (GW170817) a également était faite dans l'hypothèse où une étoile à neutrons supre-massive a été formée. Aucun signal n'a été identifié et j'ai montré que des détecteurs un ordre de grandeur plus sensibles auraient été nécessaires pour détecter un tel signal. / This thesis shows the results of the search of long duration transient gravitational waves using the data from the first two observation runs of advanced LIGO and advanced Virgo detectors. These long duration gravitational waves are mainly emitted by neutrons stars or black hole involved in extreme phenomena. For some sources, a modeling involving a complex dynamics and hydrodynamic instabilities can predict roughly the waveform. Nevertheless, for the general case, only a partial informations on the duration and frequency band are used to limits the parameters space. A time-frequency analysis, sturdy enough to modeling incertitude, has been developed and applied to the data. Combining data from two detectors in a coherent way, the analysis can distinguish between signal and detector's non gaussian background noise. In the absence of detection, we have placed upper limits on the energy emitted and the expected rate for these sources. A search for the expected signal emitted by the object created after the neutron stars coalescence and merger observed in August 2017 (GW170817) was also made assuming a supra-massive neutron star was created and survived hundred of seconds after the merger. No signal has been found and we have shown that detectors of an order of magnitude more sensible would have been required to detect a signal from this source.

No description available.

Adaptive optics work to reduce optical losses in the LIGO detectors, making them more sensitive to gravitational wave events. Mode-mismatch between the coupled optical cavities, caused by uncertainty in the radii of curvature and orientation of the interferometer optics, is one of the main sources of loss in Advanced LIGO. Thermal actuators are used to dynamically change the radius of curvature of certain interferometer optics, allowing mode mismatches to be reduced. Finely tunable astigmatic mirrors have the potential to be very useful in gravitational wave detectors for beam reflections at non-normal incidence, but have never been tested. These astigmatic composite mirrors are constructed by bonding a fused silica mirror to a non-axially-symmetric metal plate. When heated, the mirror is differentially distorted in the x- and y-directions due to its asymmetric design, resulting in an elliptical reflected beam profile. We model and test an initial mirror design, finding that it does, in fact, act as an astigmatic mirror. This finding opens a new avenue towards development of adaptive optics for current and next-generation gravitational wave detectors.

Compact binary coalescing systems: binary neutron stars, neutron star black hole pairs and binary black hole systems, represent promising candidates for gravitational wave first detection and have the potential to provide precise tests of the strong-field predictions of general relativity. Observations of binary black hole (BBH) systems will provide a wealth of information relevant to fundamental physics, astrophysics and cosmology. The search for such systems is a major priority of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo collaborations. A major area of research within LIGO-Virgo analysis groups is incorporation of spin into the search template banks used for binary black hole systems. In this dissertation, I compare the injection efficiency and parameter recovery from three binary black hole searches. One of the searches presented here uses non-spinning templates and represents the standard LIGO search for binary black holes with total masses between 35 and 100M[circle with dot]. The other two use spin aligned and anti-aligned templates representing a future search for black hole binary systems with total masses between 35-100M[circle with dot]. One of the two spinning searches has the spin parameter set to zero, nonspinning, as a check of the spinning method. (Additionally the (anti-)aligned spin searches use a retooling of the standard pipeline taking advantage of a code base designed specifically to handle Advanced LIGO data.) All three searches were run on artificial data created by the Numerical Injection Analysis 2 collaboration (NINJA2) containing Gaussian noise and numerically generated signals modeling aligned and anti-aligned spinning binary black holes. I found that for the analyzed two weeks of data the three searches recover injections with nearly equal efficiency; however, the spinning search recovers the parameters of the injections more accurately than the non-spinning search. Specifically, the parameter recovery of the spins shows a correlation between the injected and recovered spins, and the addition of spin to the template bank improves the recovery of the signal-to-noise ratio and the chirp mass for an injected signal. While spin aligned situations are geometrically low probability configurations, there are plausible astrophysical effects that lead to alignment of spins prior to merger. Therefore my results show that the spin-aligned template bank search represents an improvement on the standard non-spinning search in the highmass region and should be pursued on real data. / text

The existence of Gravitational Waves from binary black holes is one of the most interesting predictions of General Relativity. These ripples in space-time should be visible to ground-based gravitational wave detectors worldwide in the next few years. One such detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is in the process of being upgraded to its Advanced sensitivity which should make gravitational wave detections routine. Even so, the signals that LIGO will detect will be faint compared to the detector noise, and so accurate waveform templates are crucial. In this thesis, we present a detailed analysis of the accuracy of hybrid gravitational waveforms. Hybrids are created by stitching a long post-Newtonian inspiral to the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown produced by numerical relativity simulations. We begin our investigation with a study of the systematic errors in the numerical waveform, and errors due to hybridization and choice of detector noise. For current NR waveforms, the largest source of error comes from the unknown high-order terms in the post-Newtonian waveform, which we first explore for equal-mass, non-spinning binaries, and also for unequal-mass, non-spinning binaries. We then consider the potential reduction in hybrid errors if these higher-order terms were known. Finally, we investigate the possibility of using hybrid waveforms as a detection template bank and integrating NR+PN hybrids into the LIGO detection pipeline.

The existence of Gravitational Waves from binary black holes is one of the most interesting predictions of General Relativity. These ripples in space-time should be visible to ground-based gravitational wave detectors worldwide in the next few years. One such detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is in the process of being upgraded to its Advanced sensitivity which should make gravitational wave detections routine. Even so, the signals that LIGO will detect will be faint compared to the detector noise, and so accurate waveform templates are crucial. In this thesis, we present a detailed analysis of the accuracy of hybrid gravitational waveforms. Hybrids are created by stitching a long post-Newtonian inspiral to the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown produced by numerical relativity simulations. We begin our investigation with a study of the systematic errors in the numerical waveform, and errors due to hybridization and choice of detector noise. For current NR waveforms, the largest source of error comes from the unknown high-order terms in the post-Newtonian waveform, which we first explore for equal-mass, non-spinning binaries, and also for unequal-mass, non-spinning binaries. We then consider the potential reduction in hybrid errors if these higher-order terms were known. Finally, we investigate the possibility of using hybrid waveforms as a detection template bank and integrating NR+PN hybrids into the LIGO detection pipeline.