Detecting gravitational waves from inspiraling binaries with a network of detectors : coherent strategies by correlated detectors

TL;DR

This paper presents an improved coherent detection strategy for gravitational waves from inspiraling binaries using a network of correlated detectors, enhancing detection probability over previous methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new coherent statistic derived from the maximum likelihood ratio, which outperforms earlier approaches in detecting gravitational waves.

Findings

New statistic generally better than previous method

In the special case, the new and old statistics are equivalent

Quantitative analysis shows improved detection probability

Abstract

We discuss the coherent search strategy to detect gravitational waves from inspiraling compact binaries by a network of correlated laser interferometric detectors. From the maximum likelihood ratio statistic, we obtain a coherent statistic which is slightly different from and generally better than what we obtained in our previous work. In the special case when the cross spectrum of two detectors normalized by the power spectrum density is constant, the new statistic agrees with the old one. The quantitative difference of the detection probability for a given false alarm rate is also evaluated in a simple case.