5th year integrated BS-MS student from IISER Pune, doing my 5th year project under Prof Sukanta Bose.
Project Topic: Developing better signal noise discriminators for gravitational wave signals from black hole binaries in LIGO-like detectors.
While matched filtering is a very common technique used to detect signal of known shape from noise by measuring the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio)of the data .If the SNR exceeds a certain threshold we have a candidate for gravitational wave event. The reason we are not sure whether it is an event is that sometimes detector glitches (the non-Gaussian and non- stationary noise component) can also have a significant SNR with templates used for matched filtering, thereby misleading us into believing that an event has been detected.
One class of statistical tests done to resolve this ambiguity are the chi-square discriminator tests. In these tests a statistic is constructed such that in absence of a glitch the statistic follows a chi-square distribution while in presence of a glitch it deviates significantly from this distribution. A unified approach to build these type of discriminators has been worked out by Sanjeev Dhurandhar,Sukanta Bose,Bhooshan Gadre and Anuradha Gupta .Taking inspiration from this work, I am currently working on constructing and testing a discriminator for a coherent network of detectors.