Citation/Abstract

Interferometric detectors such as LIGO are now being used in searches for astrophysical gravitational waves. One search seeks to test for possible gravitational wave bursts correlated with external astrophysical triggers (e.g. gamma ray bursts). Statistical tests are necessarily used since these searches involve detector correlations with signal amplitude comparable to or less than the noise RMS. This study compares various statistical tests for signal detection in an externally triggered burst search and identifies optimal detection strategies. Tests initially compared include the likelihood ratio test and various components of the likelihood ratio statistic for two co-located co-aligned detectors. Performances were found from analytic derivations for ideal noise (stationary Gaussian) and Monte Carlo simulations were used for both ideal noise and a realistic noise model. The noise model used was mixed Gaussian, in which samples are drawn from a mixture of two Gaussian distributions, an individual sample having a small probability of being drawn from the larger variance distribution ("noisy" samples). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)