Long gravitational-wave transients and associated detection strategies for a network of terrestrial interferometers

Understand

Searches for gravitational waves (GWs) traditionally focus on persistent sources (e.g., pulsars or the stochastic background) or on transients sources (e.g., compact binary inspirals or core-collapse supernovae), which last for timescales of milliseconds to seconds.

• We explore the possibility of long GW transients with unknown waveforms lasting from many seconds to weeks.
• We propose a novel analysis technique to bridge the gap between short O(s) burst analyses and persistent stochastic analyses.
• Our technique utilizes frequency-time maps of GW strain cross-power between two spatially separated terrestrial GW detectors.