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arXiv · 2407.11693

When to Sweat the Small Stuff: identifying the most informative events from ground-based gravitational-wave detectors

Reed Essick·Daniel E. Holz
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Abstract

We explore scaling relations for the information carried by individual events, and how that information accumulates in catalogs like those from ground-based gravitational-wave detectors. For a variety of situations, the larger number of quiet/distant signals dominates the overall information over the fewer loud/close sources, independent of how many model parameters are considered. We consider implications for a range of astrophysical scenarios, including calibration uncertainty and standard siren cosmology. However, the large number of additional events obtained by lowering the detection threshold can rapidly increase costs. We introduce a simple analysis that balances the costs of analyzing increasingly large numbers of low information events against retaining a higher threshold and running a survey for longer. With the caveat that precise cost estimates are difficult to determine, current economics favor analyzing low signal-to-noise ratio events. However, the higher detection rates expected for next-generation detectors may argue for a higher signal-to-noise ratio threshold for optimal scientific return.

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Reed Essick, Daniel E. Holz. 2024-07-16. When to Sweat the Small Stuff: identifying the most informative events from ground-based gravitational-wave detectors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11693

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