Improved Coincident and Coherent Detection Statistics for Searches for Gravitational Wave Ringdown Signals

Understand

We study an improved method for detecting gravitational wave (GW) signals from perturbed black holes by earth-based detectors in the quest for searching for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs).

• Such signals, called ringdowns, are damped sinusoids whose frequency and damping constant can be used to measure a black hole's mass and spin.
• Utilizing the output from a matched filter analysis pipeline, we present an improved statistic for the detection of a ringdown signal that is found to be coincident in multiple detectors.
• The statistic addresses the non-Gaussianity of the data without the use of an additional signal-based waveform consistency test.