Physics Colloquium – Pratyusava Baral

Detecting & Measuring Gravitational Waves in Current and Future Observatories

Pratyusava Baral
Graduate Student
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Low-latency (near real-time) detection of gravitational waves (GW) is crucial for multimessenger astronomy. I contribute to maintaining and operating the GstLAL-based search pipeline, a flagship detection pipeline used by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, for the present observing run (May 2023 – ongoing). To test low-latency performance, mock data challenges (MDC) are designed. I studied the latencies of sending out public alerts, used to communicate with astronomers, after a detection using the MDC. I also demonstrated the feasibility of a neural network-based algorithm that identifies the event with the best skymap for multimessenger follow-up from a set of several GW triggers in low latency.

Looking forward to next-generation detectors such as Cosmic Explorer (CE), I developed the first Bayesian framework to estimate errors on inferred parameters, incorporating effects due to Earth’s rotation and the long arm-lengths of the detectors. These effects are important for next-generation detectors and can be used to localize sources on the sky. This framework can analyze long and loud signals in ~1 day and is capable of using waveforms containing higher modes of radiation.