Date of Defense

12-5-2025

Date of Graduation

12-2025

Department

Physics

First Advisor

Kirk Korista

Second Advisor

Surabhi Sachdev

Third Advisor

Prathamesh Joshi

Abstract

Gravitational waves (GWs) provide a whole new spectrum with which to observe astrophysical events. Multi-messenger observations including GWs are of particular interest, and these are best facilitated by early warning searches of GWs, which are typically aimed at detecting binary neutron star (BNS) mergers. This work provides an introductory overview of gravitational waves and summarizes the origins and basic physical properties of neutron stars and black holes in binary systems, focusing on BNS mergers and the detection of gravitational waves with LIGO using a modeled search. We assess the performance of a new GW search pipeline called SGNL to evaluate its prospects as an early warning pipeline and compare it to a similar pipeline called GstLAL. To test this analysis, we use one month of simulated LIGO/Virgo data with injected BNS signals that are predicted by general relativity. The templates used in the matched filtering step of the analysis are truncated at certain frequencies corresponding to certain time intervals before merger to mimic an online early warning search. We complete six sample runs, each testing a different time interval before merger, ranging from ~58 seconds before merger (29 Hz) up to the merger time (1024 Hz). In order to evaluate the performance of SGNL, we compare the number of injected signals recovered by SGNL in this analysis to those recovered by GstLAL in a similar analysis conducted previously [1]. We find that SGNL has shown improvement over GstLAL in all six sample runs: most notably 11.4% improvement at 58 seconds before merger (29 Hz) and 22.46% improvement at full bandwidth (1024 Hz). This suggests that SGNL is more sensitive than GstLAL in the low mass region (1-2 M⊙) and would perform well in an online early warning search to potentially enable synchronized electromagnetic observations of binary neutron stars at the time of merger.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

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