The Leonard E Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics holds frequent seminars on a broad range of ongoing cosmology and gravitation research topics. Unless otherwise noted, seminars are on Friday afternoons at 1:00 PM in KIRC 2175; there is a gathering for a brown bag lunch at 12:30.

The Detection of Gravitational Waves from Neutron Star – Black Hole Inspirals
Dr. Shasvath Kapadia, UWM Research Associate

Orbiting compact binaries are among the most promising sources of gravitational waves (GWs) observable by kilometer-long ground-based interferometers. Detecting these waves involves sophisticated data analysis techniques centered around matched filtering, requiring large banks of accurate GW templates, as well as methods to distinguish between candidate events triggered by true GW signals, and those caused by non-Gaussian noise (“glitches”). Focusing on searches for inspiralling neutron-star black-hole binaries, we present here a method to improve the accuracy of analytical (Post-Newtonian (PN)) waveforms by the inclusion of “pseudo” Post Newtonian terms determined by calibrating the PN waveforms to more accurate (though computationally expensive) fiducial waveforms. We further introduce a machine-learning based approach to segregate candidate events, and show that, by identifying and exploiting a number of their key properties, we can improve on existing classification methods.