An independent search of gravitational waves in the first observation run of advanced LIGO using cross-correlation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a template-free, cross-correlation based method for detecting gravitational waves in LIGO data, capable of blind searches regardless of waveform or source, and demonstrates its effectiveness on real and injected signals from the first observation run.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, assumption-free cross-correlation method for gravitational wave detection, enabling blind searches without prior waveform models.

Findings

Successfully detected binary coalescence signals in LIGO O1 data

Method is effective for waveform-agnostic GW searches

Can identify GW signals with minimal assumptions

Abstract

This work describes a template-free method to search gravitational waves (GW) using data from the LIGO observatories simultaneously. The basic idea of this method is that a GW signal is present in a short-duration data segment if the maximum correlation-coefficient between the strain signals is higher than a significant threshold and its time difference is lower than the 10 ms of inter-observatory light propagation time. Hence, this method can be used to carry out blind searches of any types of GW irrespective of the waveform and of the source type and sky location. An independent search of injected and real GW signals from compact binary coalescences (CBC) contained in the first observation run (O1) of advanced LIGO was carried out to asses its performance. On the basis of the results, the proposed method was able to detect GW produced by binary systems without making any assumption about them.