Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Apr 1997
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997aps..apr.c1104j&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, APS/AAPT Joint Meeting, April 18-21, 1997, abstract #C11.04
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The experimental gravitation group at LSU has been observing with the ALLEGRO gravitational wave detector for years, and we have learned some hard lessons. Most published discussions of gravitational wave detectors and their sensitivity ignore an important and crippling class of noise sources, those that are neither stationary nor Gaussian. All advanced detectors have found similiar sources, and reducing them to a low level has required considerable effort and expense. We argue that such noise sources should be called ``background", because they succesfully mimic the type of real event that the detector was designed to search for. Backgrounds were easily missed by the conventional measure of noise, the power spectral density. Background was found only by attempts at astronomical observation, which required implementing an analysis that was optimal for separating target events from Gaussian noise, and then examining the histograms of ``event energy" for an excess population of high energy events. A low level for this population will be essential for any convincing claim of discovery. Even then, if one wants to be fully confident that an event is not an accidental, it will probably require more than 2 independent detectors observing it in coincidence.
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