Detection of gravitational wave bursts by interferometric detectors

TL;DR

This paper evaluates and compares three filters designed to detect burst-like gravitational wave signals in interferometric detector data, including two general non-linear filters and a peak correlator, using supernova models as benchmarks.

Contribution

Introduces and assesses three filters for burst detection in gravitational wave data, including two general non-linear filters and a peak correlator with prior waveform information.

Findings

The filters can be used for online triggering of burst events.

Performance benchmarks are established using supernova gravitational-wave models.

The peak correlator estimates gain when waveform information is available.

Abstract

We study in this paper some filters for the detection of burst-like signals in the data of interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. We present first two general (non-linear) filters with no {\it a priori} assumption on the waveforms to detect. A third filter, a peak correlator, is also introduced and permits to estimate the gain, when some prior information is known about the waveforms. We use the catalogue of supernova gravitational-wave signals built by Zwerger and M\"uller in order to have a benchmark of the performance of each filter and to compare to the performance of the optimal filter. The three filters could be a part of an on-line triggering in interferometric gravitational-wave detectors, specialised in the selection of burst events.