Sensitivity curves for searches for gravitational-wave backgrounds

By E. Thrane, J. Romano. 2013

460 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a graphical representation of detector sensitivity curves for stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds that takes into account the increase in sensitivity that comes from integrating over frequency in addition to integrating over time. This method is valid for backgrounds that have a power-law spectrum in the analysis band. We call these graphs “power-law integrated curves.” For simplicity, we consider cross-correlation searches for unpolarized and isotropic stochastic backgrounds using two or more detectors. We apply our method to construct power-law integrated sensitivity curves for second-generation ground-based detectors such as Advanced LIGO, space-based detectors such as LISA and the Big Bang Observer, and timing residuals from a pulsar timing array. The code used to produce these plots is available at https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P1300115/public for researchers interested in constructing similar sensitivity curves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f065e95be8a71cb63bdf0eb2f2c8d79bf71a9e17

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Science with the space-based interferometer LISA. IV: probing inflation with gravitational waves (2016, methodology): “Then, employing an analogous procedure to that introduced in [76], an upper bound for ΩGW(f) can be found for a given range of possible values of the spectral index.”
Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves (2014, methodology): “Jenet et al., 2006). An alternative method for graphically representing the sensitivity of a GW detector to stochastic backgrounds, called the power-law-integrated sensitivity curve, was suggested by Thrane and Romano (2013). This method accounts for the there being power across all frequencies in t”
Probing the gravitational wave background from cosmic strings with LISA (2019, methodology): “[172] introduced a very useful concept: the power law sensitivity curve (PLS) of a detector.”
Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, methodology): “[127] for constructing PLS curves indicates that the analysis of SGWBs with complex spectral shapes is in principle feasible with LISA, provided that sufficient SNR is available.”
Oscillations in the stochastic gravitational wave background from sharp features and particle production during inflation (2020, methodology): “The sensitivity curves shown here have been computed in [8] and correspond to the power-law-integrated sensitivity (PLIS) curves defined in [61].”
Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, methodology): “s(f) 2 ! 1=2 : (110) For a given pair (SNR;T), one obtains a series in of power-law integrated curves. One denes the power-law integrated sensitivity curve PI(f) as the envelope of those functions [223] PI(f) max 2 4f SNR p T Z fmax f min df f h2 sens(f) 2 ! 1=2 3 5: (111) Any SGWB signal GW(f) w”
Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions (2015, methodology): “The power law sensitivity curve is a concept developed in [34] with the aim of accounting for the improvement in the usual sensitivity curves of a GW detector that comes from the broadband nature of a stochastic signal.”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, methodology): “…band from fmin to fmax for a time Tobs, the signal-to-noise ratio can be written as (Thrane and Romano 2013): q2sto ¼ TobsMðM 1Þ Z fmax fmin df S2hðf Þ S2nðf Þ : ð12Þ We redirect the reader to Allen and Romano (1999); Thrane and Romano (2013); Romano and Cornish (2017) for a full analysis.”
Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, methodology): “By calculating the stochastic GW background arising from the coalescences of PBH binaries and comparing its strength to the sensitivity of LIGO [86, 87], one can constrain the fraction of DM in PBHs.”
Baryogenesis from the weak scale to the grand unification scale (2020, background): “(151) The shaded regions indicate the power-law-integrated sensitivity curves of current and planned experiments (Thrane and Romano, 2013).”
Gravitational wave constraints on the primordial black hole dominated early universe (2020, unknown): “For instance, the frequency corresponding to the peak of the early isocurvature perturbation at kUV is given by fUV ≈ 1.7× 103Hz ( gH(TPBH) 108 )1/6( g∗(Teva) 106.75 )1/4( g∗,s(Teva) 106.75 )−1/3( MPBH,f 104g )−5/6 , (2.33) which interestingly may enter the current observational window of the LIGO/V”
New limits on cosmic strings from gravitational wave observation (2017, methodology): “The instrumental curves are in the “power-law integrated” form [22], and were calculated using the publicly available codes used in Ref.”
Gravitational-wave cosmology across 29 decades in frequency (2015, unknown): “Romano [50].”