Search method for coincident events from LIGO and IceCube detectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coincidence search method combining gravitational wave data from LIGO with neutrino observations from IceCube, significantly reducing false alarms for detecting astrophysical events.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel coincidence detection approach that integrates LIGO and IceCube data using an unbinned maximum likelihood method, improving detection confidence.

Findings

False alarm rate estimated at 1 per 435 years

Method tested with realistic Monte Carlo simulations

Significantly reduces false alarms compared to individual detectors

Abstract

We present a coincidence search method for astronomical events using gravitational wave detectors in conjunction with other astronomical observations. We illustrate our method for the specific case of the LIGO gravitational wave detector and the IceCube neutrino detector. LIGO trigger-events and IceCube events which occur within a given time window are selected as time-coincident events. Then the spatial overlap of the reconstructed event directions is evaluated using an unbinned maximum likelihood method. Our method was tested with Monte Carlo simulations based on realistic LIGO and IceCube event distributions. We estimated a typical false alarm rate for the analysis to be 1 event per 435 years. This is significantly smaller than the false alarm rates of the ndividual detectors.