OctApps: a library of Octave functions for continuous gravitational-wave data analysis

Karl Wette,Reinhard Prix,Matthew Pitkin,Paola Leaci,John T Whelan,David Keitel,Christoph Dreissigacker

doi:10.21105/joss.00707

Abstract

Gravitational waves are minute ripples in spacetime, first predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1916. Gravitational waves from rapidly-rotating neutron stars, whose shape deviates from perfect axisymmetry, are a potential astrophysical source of gravitational waves, but which so far have not been detected. The search for this type of signals, also known as continuous waves, presents a significant data analysis challenge, as their weak signatures are expected to be buried deep within the instrumental noise of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. The OctApps library provides various functions, written in Octave, intended to aid research scientists who perform searches for continuous gravitational waves.

Highlights

(Abbott, 2016) and binary neutron stars (Abbott, 2017) in data from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors
Src/cw-line-veto: functions which implement detection statistics which are robust to instrumental disturbances in the detector data, as described in (Keitel, Prix, Papa, Leaci, & Siddiqi, 2014)
Src/cw-metric-template-banks: functions which determine the number of filtering operations required to search for continuous waves over various astrophysical parameter spaces, described further in (Wette & Prix, 2013) and (Leaci & Prix, 2015)

Summary

Introduction

(Abbott, 2016) and binary neutron stars (Abbott, 2017) in data from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors. For reviews of continuous-wave sources, data analysis techniques, and recent searches of LIGO and Virgo data, see for example Prix The OctApps library provides various functions, written in Octave (Eaton, Bateman, Hauberg, & Wehbring, 2015), intended to aid research scientists who perform searches for continuous gravitational waves. Src/cw-data-analysis: general-purpose functions for continuous-wave data analysis.

Results

Conclusion