Jess McIver

University of British Columbia, February 16, 12:00 pm

New frontiers in gravitational-wave astrophysics

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration is currently in the middle of its fourth observing run. The two LIGO detectors in the US have enabled a high rate of candidate gravitational-wave detections from compact object mergers - roughly one every few days - with unprecedented detector sensitivities. In addition to providing a high rate of extragalactic gravitational-wave sources, the improved sensitivity of the LIGO detectors has enhanced the possibility of a first galactic detection of gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars.

I will introduce a new search method for galactic “continuous” gravitational wave sources that leverages the Viterbi algorithm. I will also discuss the challenges for extracting a high rate of gravitational-wave signals from detector data and a new machine learning method to automatically identify non-stationary detector noise overlapping with candidate events in order to improve the accuracy of source property estimation.