Searching for gravitational waves from inspiraling compact objects at low frequency in Einstein Telescope
Supervisor Name
Andrew Miller
Supervisor Email
andrew.miller.ligo@gmail.com
University
Nikhef / Utrecht University
Research field
Physics
Bio
I am a postdoctoral scholar at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. My research interests include the detection of gravitational waves from neutron stars, primordial black holes binaries and particle dark matter. I am a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations.
Gravitational waves, tiny ripples in spacetime, were detected for the first time about 10 years ago from a pair of merging black holes. Now, such detections are routine, happening roughly once per week or so. In the future, gravitational-wave detectors will become so sensitive, and reach down to such low frequencies, that the signals will last hours-days in the future, not seconds, and overlap. Matched filtering, the method used to search for these signals by correlating a model with the data and looking for a match, may become computationally intractable. Thus, new methods will have to be developed to search for such systems. In this project, we propose to develop a new method that essentially sums the power of different time- frequency tracks of particular signals, where each track is uniquely defined by the black hole masses and spins. The student will work on either analytic or numerical aspects of this development, depending on their interests, and work with members of the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations on this project.
