Status of the joint LIGO--TAMA300 inspiral analysis

TL;DR

This paper reports on the status of a joint gravitational wave search from neutron star inspirals using LIGO and TAMA300 data, highlighting analysis methods, efficiency, and background estimation.

Contribution

It presents the first combined analysis of LIGO and TAMA300 data, establishing coincidence criteria and evaluating detection efficiency and background noise.

Findings

Achieved 78% detection efficiency for simulated signals.

Identified that TAMA300 misses primarily very distant signals.

Estimated background noise using time slide analysis.

Abstract

We present the status of the joint search for gravitational waves from inspiraling neutron star binaries in the LIGO Science Run 2 and TAMA300 Data Taking Run 8 data, which was taken from February 14 to April 14, 2003, by the LIGO and TAMA collaborations. In this paper we discuss what has been learned from an analysis of a subset of the data sample reserved as a ``playground''. We determine the coincidence conditions for parameters such as the coalescence time and chirp mass by injecting simulated Galactic binary neutron star signals into the data stream. We select coincidence conditions so as to maximize our efficiency of detecting simulated signals. We obtain an efficiency for our coincident search of 78 %, and show that we are missing primarily very distant signals for TAMA300. We perform a time slide analysis to estimate the background due to accidental coincidence of noise triggers. We find that the background triggers have a very different character from the triggers of simulated signals.