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Free keywords:
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc, Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM
Abstract:
The second generation of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors will begin
taking data in September 2015. Sensitive and computationally-efficient data
analysis methods will be required to maximize what we learn from their
observations. We describe improvements made to the offline analysis pipeline
searching for gravitational waves from stellar-mass compact binary
coalescences, and assess how these improvements affect search sensitivity.
Starting with the two-stage ihope pipeline used in S5, S6 and VSR1-3 and using
two weeks of S6/VSR3 data as test periods, we first demonstrate a pipeline with
a simpler workflow. This single-stage pipeline performs matched filtering and
coincidence testing only once. This simplification allows us to reach much
lower false-alarm rates for loud candidate events. We then describe an
optimized chi-squared test which minimizes computational cost. Next, we compare
methods of generating template banks, demonstrating that a fixed bank may be
used for extended stretches of time. Fixing the bank reduces the cost and
complexity, compared to the previous method of regenerating a template bank
every 2048 s of analyzed data. Creating a fixed bank shared by all detectors
also allows us to apply a more stringent coincidence test, whose performance we
quantify. With these improvements, we find a 10% increase in sensitive volume
with a negligible change in computational cost.
