Performance of an externally triggered gravitational-wave burst search

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of targeted gravitational-wave burst searches linked to external astrophysical triggers, demonstrating improved sensitivity for single sky position searches over all-sky approaches.

Contribution

It analyzes the performance of triggered gravitational-wave burst searches in both Gaussian and real detector noise, highlighting conditions for optimal sensitivity.

Findings

Single sky position search is ~20% more sensitive than all-sky search.

Achieves Gaussian limited sensitivity in real non-Gaussian data.

Identifies conditions to reach optimal detector sensitivity.

Abstract

We present the performance of searches for gravitational wave bursts associated with external astrophysical triggers as a function of the search sky region. We discuss both the case of Gaussian noise and real noise of gravitational wave detectors for arbitrary detector networks. We demonstrate the ability to reach Gaussian limited sensitivity in real non-Gaussian data, and show the conditions required to attain it. We find that a single sky position search is ~20% more sensitive than an all-sky search of the same data.