SPY
HILL
Research
Poughkeepsie, New York
SPY
HILL
Research
Students learn about the physics of gravitational waves and how they are detected, and then use real data from a global network of gravitational wave observatories to perform their own personal research investigation.
Read about each student's investigation in their own words:
Event GW150914, which represents the merger of two black holes with masses of 29 and 36 M⊙, was observed by the Advanced LIGO on September 14, 2015. In this research, we applied software injection and recovery to LIGO bulk data from S5 and S6 run using the GW150914 template and proved that events with such magnitude would not have been observed by the initial LIGO or the Enhanced LIGO in the S5 or S6 run due to the higher background noise level. In order to be recognized as an event, it would have been required to be at least one times larger in magnitude.
I report the results of my investigation on the sensitivity of LIGO at earlier stages. I took the waveform signal of the event GW150914 to make injections into the data from LIGO's S6 run and recovered the injections. Overall, none of signal-to-noise ratio values recovered was high enough to claim a detection. In the later portion of S6 where the noise was weaker, the signal could be identified as a candidate event at best. I compared the S6 run with the data from the earlier stages of LIGO and found that the equipment in earlier runs was insucient to make the detection as well.