CaltechAUTHORS
Published February 20, 2020 | Version Submitted
Journal Article Open

A self-consistent method to estimate the rate of compact binary coalescences with a Poisson mixture model

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
  • 2. ROR icon International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
  • 3. ROR icon National Institute for Subatomic Physics
  • 4. ROR icon Stony Brook University
  • 5. ROR icon Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory
  • 6. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 7. ROR icon Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics
  • 8. ROR icon University of Tokyo
  • 9. ROR icon University of Toronto
  • 10. ROR icon Pennsylvania State University
  • 11. ROR icon Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

The recently published GWTC-1 (Abbott B P et al (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration) 2019 Phys. Rev. X 9 031040)—a journal article summarizing the search for gravitational waves (GWs) from coalescing compact binaries in data produced by the LIGO-Virgo network of ground-based detectors during their first and second observing runs—quoted estimates for the rates of binary neutron star, neutron star black hole binary, and binary black hole mergers, as well as assigned probabilities of astrophysical origin for various significant and marginal GW candidate events. In this paper, we delineate the formalism used to compute these rates and probabilities, which assumes that triggers above a low ranking statistic threshold, whether of terrestrial or astrophysical origin, occur as independent Poisson processes. In particular, we include an arbitrary number of astrophysical categories by redistributing, via mass-based template weighting, the foreground probabilities of candidate events, across source classes. We evaluate this formalism on synthetic GW data, and demonstrate that this method works well for the kind of GW signals observed during the first and second observing runs.

Additional Information

© 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd. Received 13 May 2019, revised 13 November 2019; Accepted for publication 5 December 2019; Published 16 January 2020. We thank the LIGO-Virgo Scientific Collaboration for access to data. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operates under cooperative agreement PHY-0757058. We gratefully acknowledge the support by NSF Grant PHY-1626190 for the UWM computer cluster. We also thank Deep Chatterjee, Shaon Ghosh and Chad Hanna for illuminating discussions. SJK gratefully acknowledges suppport through NSF grant PHY-1607585. SRM thanks the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSSTC, NSF Cybertraining Grant # 1829740, the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
100760
DOI
10.1088/1361-6382/ab5f2d
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20200116-101440415

Related works

Describes
10.1088/1361-6382/ab5f2d (DOI)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06881 (URL)
https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20190507-102334917 (URL)

Funding

NSF
PHY-0757058
NSF
PHY-1626190
NSF
PHY-1607585
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation
NSF
OAC-1829740
Brinson Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Dates

Created
2020-01-16
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2023-06-01
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
LIGO , Physics Department