DR. ANURADHA GUPTA

The two advanced gravitational wave (GW) interferometric detectors - advanced LIGO (aLIGO) - will start their observational runs in this year. Among the most promising sources of GW which aLIGO is expected to detect are the compact binary coalescences (CBCs). However, the successful detection of such sources partly depend on how well we are able to characterize and analyze the non-stationary and non-Gaussian noise present in these detectors. We model two important classes of transient artifacts that contribute to this noise and adversely affect the detector sensitivity to CBC signals. One of them is the sine-Gaussian glitch, characterized by a central frequency f0 and a quality factor Q and the other is the chirping sine-Gaussian glitch, which is characterized by f0, Q as well as a chirp parameter. We study the response of a compact binary inspiral template bank on these two families of glitches. Two important characteristics (among many) of this response are the distributions of the signal-to-noise ratio and the time-lag of individual templates. We show how these distributions differ from those when the detector data has a real CBC signal instead of a glitch. We argue that these computationally cheaper distinctions can be used to develop useful signal-artifact discriminators and can help improve the sensitivity of low-latency CBC searches.