CGCA Seminar – Shio Sakon

Detecting Gravitational Wave Signals – Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities

Shio Sakon
Pennsylvania State University

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration’s fourth observing run (O4) produced a remarkable expansion of the gravitational-wave transient catalog, with nearly three times as many significant detections as were known at the start of the run. Among these were several first-of-their-kind events that challenged existing theories, and the increased rate of detections reflected the improvement in detector sensitivity and analysis capabilities over the past decade.

This seminar will focus on the development and operation of the GstLAL matched-filter search pipeline, which identified over 240 significant gravitational-wave candidates during O4. I will discuss the new method for constructing template banks, sets of simulated gravitational-wave signals that form the foundation of matched-filter searches, which improves the computational efficiency of bank generation. This approach was deployed in all O4 GstLAL production analyses, including the subsolar-mass search, which targets potential signatures of new physics and represents an additional area of my work.

Gravitational-wave astronomy has an exciting future ahead. With upcoming observing runs starting in mid to late this year, future observing runs in the planning, and next-generation detectors on the horizon, the opportunities for discovery are rapidly expanding. Multi-messenger observations, deeper searches, and computationally efficient pipelines will play a central role in revealing new aspects of our Universe. I will outline the research I envision in the future observing runs with an emphasis on enabling future discoveries.