P-41 Testing a Maximum Entropy waveform recovery method on data injected with simulated gravitational waves

Buller Hallway

The purpose of LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is to detect gravitational waves through the use of laser interferometry. Sources such as seismic activity or unwanted particles in the laser vacuum arms produce a level of background noise that presently obfuscates nearly any gravitational wave signal that LIGO might detect. The next generation of LIGO, advanced LIGO, is expected to increase detector sensitivity tenfold. To prepare for gravitational wave detection in aLIGO, we test a maximum entropy method approach to signal extraction by (1) injecting artificial signals into background noise data, (2) extracting those signals using the maximum entropy method, and (3) comparing the extracted signal to the original by measuring cross-correlation between the two and by comparing calculated best-fit parameters (such as central frequency and envelope width for a sine-gaussian wavepacket) for the extracted waveform with the known parameters from the original.