First joint Gravitational Waves search by the Auriga-Explorer-Nautilus-Virgo collaboration

TL;DR

This paper reports a joint search for gravitational wave bursts using data from multiple detectors, employing optimized coincidence algorithms and signal injections to improve detection confidence and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a combined analysis method for multiple detectors targeting galactic signals, enhancing detection sensitivity and false alarm control.

Findings

Successful identification of coincident candidate events

Quantified detection efficiency through signal injections

Established confidence intervals for source rate estimates

Abstract

We present results of the search for coincident burst excitations over a 24 hours long data set collected by AURIGA, EXPLORER, NAUTILUS and Virgo detectors during September 2005. The search of candidate triggers was performed independently on each of the data sets from single detectors. We looked for two-fold time coincidences between these candidates using an algorithm optimized for a given population of sources and we calculated the efficiency of detection through injections of templated signal waveforms into the streams of data. To this purpose we have considered the case of signals shaped as damped sinusoids coming from the galactic center direction. In this framework our method targets an optimal balance between high efficiency and low false alarm rate, aiming at setting confidence intervals as stringent as possible in terms of the rate of the selected source models.