Media

PASC18 Presentation: I talk about how LIGO / Virgo search for gravitational waves with some more focus on how we handle computing for high and low latency analyses.

Detroit Free Press: Article on discovery of GW17014, which I had the fortune to be the first to see due to use of the low latency analysis which I designed known as PyCBC Live.

Sound of a Binary Neutron Star Merger: This converts the detector data to an audible form. Towards the end, you can just hear (turn up your audio!) the chirp of the binary neutron star as it is just about to merge. It is synced to a time-frequency (qtransform) decomposition of the data. If you are quick, you’ll realize that I am showing data into the future. This plot is made by subtracting off the signal we believe is in the data and then revealing the original data in sync with the audio version of the same.

Matched filtering demo of GW151226 and GW150914: These show the basic idea of how matched filtering works, which is a crucial technique that we use to extract gravitational wave signals from detector data. For GW150914, the signal is so loud, that this procedure is a bit overkill, but you can see why this technique becomes important as signals become quieter. In fact, it is known that this is the optimal technique if one’s noise is Gaussian.