NSF-BSF: New Data Analysis Techniques for a New Era in GW Astrophysics

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Since the first detection of gravitational waves by NSF's LIGO observatory, gravitational wave Astrophysics has become one of the most dynamic fields of physics and astronomy. In the next few years the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK) collaboration will continue to improve the sensitivity of their observations, discover new black hole and neutron star merger events and make their data public. This award aims to improve the techniques used to analyze gravitational wave data and make astrophysical inferences using it. The improved analysis pipelines will be applied to upcoming data in order to learn about the astrophysical processes that created these sources of gravitational waves and study the gravitational dynamics in a very extreme regime. Although we can see these mergers occurring across our universe we still do not understand how these binary systems formed and questions remain about many properties of the black holes and neutron stars in them. The research produced under this award will be disseminated widely across the scientific community and efforts will be made to make it accessible to non-scientists through public lectures and other outreach activities.This award aims to improve the techniques used to analyze Gravitational Wave data from the LVK collaboration and make astrophysical inferences using it. The improved analysis pipelines will be applied to upcoming data in order to learn about the astrophysical processes that created the Gravitational Wave sources and study the gravitational dynamics in a very extreme regime. In particular, this award will provide an independent analysis and astrophysical interpretation of the LVK data: 1. The team will use the parameter estimation code cogwheel which is extremely efficient due to the implementation of a new set of coordinates as well as the relative binning algorithm extended for higher modes to do a variety of novel studies that its efficiency enables. 2. They will combine the results of their parameter study, including from events found by their independent pipeline to set constraints on the properties of the population of GW sources. 3. They will make several improvements to their independent search pipeline ranging from technical ones related to their treatment of the noise and of so-called glitches to adding the capability of including higher modes and precession as part of the search. 4. They will work on improving h(t) at low frequency by using information from the so-called auxiliary channels. LIGO recently released the auxiliary channels around GW170814 and they intend to investigate different techniques to improve the low frequency “control noise”. 5. They will augment their current efforts, which are mainly centered around data analysis, with some more theoretical work related to tidal dissipation around black holes as well as efforts to improve existing waveforms.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.