arXiv subjects

Marco Drago

Publications and source records attributed to Marco Drago.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

First demonstration of early warning gravitational wave alerts

Gravitational-wave observations became commonplace in Advanced LIGO-Virgo's recently concluded third observing run. 56 non-retracted candidates were identified and publicly announced in near real time. Gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers, however, remain of special interest since they can be precursors to high-energy astrophysical phenomena like $γ$-ray bursts and kilonovae. While late-time electromagnetic emissions provide important information about the astrophysical processes within, the prompt emission along with gravitational waves uniquely reveals the extreme matter and gravity during - and in the seconds following - merger. Rapid communication of source location and properties from the gravitational-wave data is crucial to facilitate multi-messenger follow-up of such sources. This is especially enabled if the partner facilities are forewarned via an early-warning (pre-merger) alert. Here we describe the commissioning and performance of such a low-latency infrastructure within LIGO-Virgo. We present results from an end-to-end mock data challenge that detects binary neutron star mergers and alerts partner facilities before merger. We set expectations for these alerts in future observing runs.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2020

Observing an intermediate mass black hole GW190521 with minimal assumptions

On May 21, 2019 Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors observed a gravitational-wave transient GW190521, the heaviest binary black-hole merger detected to date with the remnant mass of 142$\,$M$_\odot$ that was published recently. This observation is the first strong evidence for the existence of intermediate-mass black holes. The significance of this observation was determined by the coherent WaveBurst (cWB) - search algorithm, which identified GW190521 with minimal assumptions on its source model. In this paper, we demonstrate the capabilities of cWB to detect binary black holes without use of the signal templates, describe the details of the GW190521 detection and establish the consistency of the model-agnostic reconstruction of GW190521 by cWB with the theoretical waveform model of a binary black hole.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2019

Expanding Core-Collapse Supernova Search Horizon of Neutrino Detectors

Core-Collapse Supernovae, failed supernovae and quark novae are expected to release an energy of few $10^{53}$ ergs through MeV neutrinos and a network of detectors is operative to look online for these events. However, when the source distance increases and/or the average energy of emitted neutrinos decreases, the signal statistics drops and the identification of these low statistic astrophysical bursts could be challenging. In a standard search, neutrino detectors characterise the observed clusters of events with a parameter called multiplicity, i.e. the number of collected events in a fixed time-window. We discuss a new parameter called $ξ$ (=multiplicity/duration of the cluster) in order to add the information on the temporal behaviour of the expected signal with respect to background. By adding this parameter to the multiplicity we optimise the search of astrophysical bursts and we increase their detection horizon. Moreover, the use of the $ξ$ can be easily implemented in an online system and can apply also to a network of detectors like SNEWS. For these reasons this work is relevant in the multi-messengers era when fast alerts with high significance are mandatory.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Leveraging waveform complexity for confident detection of gravitational waves

The recent completion of Advanced LIGO suggests that gravitational waves (GWs) may soon be directly observed. Past searches for gravitational-wave transients have been impacted by transient noise artifacts, known as glitches, introduced into LIGO data due to instrumental and environmental effects. In this work, we explore how waveform complexity, instead of signal-to-noise ratio, can be used to rank event candidates and distinguish short duration astrophysical signals from glitches. We test this framework using a new hierarchical pipeline that directly compares the Bayesian evidence of explicit signal and glitch models. The hierarchical pipeline is shown to have strong performance, and in particular, allows high-confidence detections of a range of waveforms at realistic signal-to-noise ratio with a two detector network.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

Low Latency transient search of Gravitational Waves for the Advanced Detectors

The reliability of the first detection is one of the most interesting challenges for the gravitational wave community. To increase the detection confidence, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations have already started coincident observations between gravitational waves detectors and other astronomical instruments, like electromagnetic or neutrino detectors. This can be done in two directions: searching for gravitational waves triggered by the electromagnetic information, or pointing the electromagnetic telescopes to the sky position given in real time by the gravitational wave analysis. The success of the latter case depends strongly on the analysis speed of gravitational wave pipelines to analyze data and extract any gravitational wave candidate with as much information as possible. In this paper we discuss the case of the coherent Waveburst pipeline, the main pipeline used in the past scientific LIGO-Virgo analyses for the search of gravitational wave transients, reporting the capability of making an all-sky and all-time analysis and the analysis speed performance.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2015

A Proposed Search for the Detection of Gravitational Waves from Eccentric Binary Black Holes

Most of compact binary systems are expected to circularize before the frequency of emitted gravitational waves (GWs) enters the sensitivity band of the ground based interferometric detectors. However, several mechanisms have been proposed for the formation of binary systems, which retain eccentricity throughout their lifetimes. Since no matched-filtering algorithm has been developed to extract continuous GW signals from compact binaries on orbits with low to moderate values of eccentricity, and available algorithms to detect binaries on quasi-circular orbits are sub-optimal to recover these events, in this paper we propose a search method for detection of gravitational waves produced from the coalescences of eccentric binary black holes (eBBH). We study the search sensitivity and the false alarm rates on a segment of data from the second joint science run of LIGO and Virgo detectors, and discuss the implications of the eccentric binary search for the advanced GW detectors.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2015

Regression of Environmental Noise in LIGO Data

We address the problem of noise regression in the output of gravitational-wave (GW) interferometers, using data from the physical environmental monitors (PEM). The objective of the regression analysis is to predict environmental noise in the gravitational-wave channel from the PEM measurements. One of the most promising regression method is based on the construction of Wiener-Kolmogorov filters. Using this method, the seismic noise cancellation from the LIGO GW channel has already been performed. In the presented approach the Wiener-Kolmogorov method has been extended, incorporating banks of Wiener filters in the time-frequency domain, multi-channel analysis and regulation schemes, which greatly enhance the versatility of the regression analysis. Also we presents the first results on regression of the bi-coherent noise in the LIGO data.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2012

Multimessenger Science Reach and Analysis Method for Common Sources of Gravitational Waves and High-energy Neutrinos

We present the baseline multimessenger analysis method for the joint observations of gravitational waves (GW) and high-energy neutrinos (HEN), together with a detailed analysis of the expected science reach of the joint search. The analysis method combines data from GW and HEN detectors, and uses the blue-luminosity-weighted distribution of galaxies. We derive expected GW+HEN source rate upper limits for a wide range of source parameters covering several emission models. Using published sensitivities of externally triggered searches, we derive joint upper limit estimates both for the ongoing analysis with the initial LIGO-Virgo GW detectors with the partial IceCube detector (22 strings) HEN detector and for projected results to advanced LIGO-Virgo detectors with the completed IceCube (86 strings). We discuss the constraints these upper limits impose on some existing GW+HEN emission models.

astro-ph.HE↗