Semianalytic Sensitivity Estimates for Catalogs of Gravitational-Wave Transients

Understand

I investigate the sensitivity of gravitational-wave searches by analyzing the response of matched filters in stationary Gaussian noise.

• In particular, I focus on the ability to analytically model the distribution of observed filter responses maximized over coalescence phase and/or a template bank as well as the response of statistics defined for a network of detectors.
• Semianalytic sensitivity estimates derived assuming stationary Gaussian noise are compared to sensitivity estimates obtained from real searches processing real noise, which is neither perfectly stationary nor perfectly Gaussian.
• I find that semianalytic estimates are able to reproduce real search sensitivity for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration's third observing run with high fidelity.