Quantifying the Effect of Power Spectral Density Uncertainty on Gravitational-Wave Parameter Estimation for Compact Binary Sources [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05149


In order to perform Bayesian parameter estimation to infer the source properties of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences (CBCs), the noise characteristics of the detector must be understood. It is typically assumed that the detector noise is stationary and Gaussian, characterized by a power spectral density (PSD) that is measured with infinite precision. We present a new method to incorporate the uncertainty in the power spectral density estimation into the Bayesian inference of the binary source parameters. We calculate the PSD for the first 11 gravitational-wave detections reported by LIGO and Virgo with an on-source method, using only data from the analysis segment to obtain posterior samples for the PSD, which is modeled analytically using the BayesLine algorithm [1] as a sum of a set of Lorentzians and a broadband spline. We demonstrate how to marginalize over the uncertainty encompassed in the full PSD posterior for these first 11 CBC detections and find that incorporating the PSD uncertainty only leads to variations in the positions and width of the binary parameter posteriors on the order of a few percent.

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S. Biscoveanu, C. Haster, S. Vitale, et. al.
Mon, 13 Apr 20
15/35

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