Data Analysis Techniques in Gravitational wave astronomy

Abstract

As the field of gravitational wave astronomy strides rapidly towards its rst direct detection, developing e cient data analysis strategies become crucial due to the low signal to noise ratio in the data. The noise level is compara-ble to the signal strength and this poses a serious threat of false detection. The rst part of my thesis addresses the issues of false-alarm caused by an important family of glitches that can be modeled as sine-Gaussian in the data analysis technique used for detecting signals from coalescing compact binaries. We develop three approximate analytical expressions that allows us to predict the nature of spurious triggers generated by these glitches. The second part of my thesis concerns with the map-making in stochastic grav-itational wave background. Here again, the weakness of the signal and the nature of the detector beam makes the problem non-trivial. We incorporate a prior knowledge on the source distribution through regularization functions and investigate the improvement in quality of reconstructed map. This work will have implications in placing an upper limit on the source parameter in the absence of detection.