According to Einstein's theory of General Relativity, the acceleration of matter can cause ripples in the curvature of spacetime, given the name gravitational waves. Such ripples are negligible in magnitude for all but the most energetic astrophysical events, such as the coalescence of compact binary stars. In 2015, gravitational waves were first directly detected from a binary black hole (BBH) coalescence [19]. This was achieved using two independent laser interferometers which each measured the fluctuations caused by the gravitational waves as they passed by. Matched filtering and other data analysis techniques were then employed to identify the properties of the source and measure the likelihood that the detection is a false alarm. The efficacy of these matched filtering techniques is pivotal to not only detecting gravitational waves, but drawing as much information about their sources as possible. The methods for detecting a BBH involve the construction of a template bank; a group of synthesised waveforms which each represent a detectable series of gravitational waves that a BBH could produce. The characteristics of a BBH template are governed by the two masses and how they spin, the distance to the source, its orientation and its sky location. Current template banks do not include templates for sources where the spins are misaligned with the orbital momentum, which is the cause of precession in BBH. Thus, the algorithms are effective for detecting a non-precessing BBH, but much less sensitive towards precessing sources. Creating a template bank which includes all possible precessing waveforms is computationally infeasible and would induce enough statistical noise to negate any extra sensitivity gained. However, many precessing signals would be undetectable or indistinguishable from non-precessing signals. Including such signals in a bank would result in no gain in its sensitivity. This thesis attempts to locate areas of precessing parameter space where waveforms are distinguishable from non-precessing sources, and begins work on forming a function which maps observable precession through parameter space.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:768026 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Muir, Alistair |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/118182/ |
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