UTBRG > Interests > Analysis > Stochastic Sources
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A stochastic background of gravitational radiation is a random signal produced by the incoherent superposition of gravitational waves from a large number of weak, uncorrelated sources. It might be cosmological in nature (i.e., a remnant of processes that occurred shortly after the big bang) or it might be the result of much more recent processes (e.g., a confusion limit of radiation produced by unresolved binary systems). But in either case, a stochastic signal looks just like noise in a signal detector, and unless we are exceptionally lucky and/or can build a detector whose instrumental noise power is much lower than that of the signal, we will need to cross-correlate the output of two gravitational wave detectors to separate the stochastic signal from the detector noise.

Research at UTB/TSC

We are interested in a number of issues related to data analysis algorithms for stochastic background searches. These include:

• A comparison of the performance of the standard cross-correlation and maximum-likelihood statistics for stochastic gravitational wave signals.
• A locally-optimal (or robust) cross-correlation statistic, which is expected to perform better than either the standard cross-correlation or maximum-likelihood statistics when the detector noise has non-Gaussian components.
• Using engineering data from the two LIGO interferometers to set an upper limit on the strength of stochastic sources.

More information on each of these items can be found in drafts of two papers (referenced below) and the home page for the stochastic sources upper limits group.

References