Seedless clustering in all-sky searches for gravitational-wave transients

Understand

The problem of searching for unmodeled gravitational-wave bursts can be thought of as a pattern recognition problem: how to find statistically significant clusters in spectrograms of strain power when the precise signal morphology is unknown.

• In a previous publication, we showed how "seedless clustering" can be used to dramatically improve the sensitivity of searches for long-lived gravitational-wave transients.
• In order to manage the computational costs, this initial analysis focused on externally triggered searches where the source location and emission time are both known to some degree of precision.
• In this paper, we show how the principle of seedless clustering can be extended to facilitate computationally-feasible, all-sky searches where the direction and emission time of the source are entirely unknown.