Gravitational Waves from Spinning Inspirals of Compact Objects

by Raymond Vivien (LIGO Laboratory, Caltech, Pasadena US)

Thursday 3 Oct 2013, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

131 (INFN edificio C)

Gravitational waves are on the verge of opening a brand new window on the Universe. However, gravitational wave astronomy comes with very unique challenges in data analysis and signal processing in order to lead to new discoveries in astrophysics. Among the sources of gravitational waves, inspiraling binary systems of compact objects stand out as: likely to be detected, and relatively easy to model.

The detection of a gravitational wave event is challenging and will be a rewarding achievement by itself. After such a detection, measurement of source properties holds major promise for improving our astrophysical understanding and requires reliable methods for parameter estimation and model selection. I will present the development of a parameter-estimation and model-selection algorithm, based on Bayesian statistical theory and using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for LIGO and Virgo. This method can infer for compact binaries all spinning parameters, which are not only believed to be astrophysically significant, not including them in the analysis can lead to biases in parameter recovery.