Submitting Campus
Prescott
Department
Physics and Astronomy
Document Type
Article
Publication/Presentation Date
11-8-2011
Abstract/Description
This paper describes the most accurate analytical frequentist assessment to date of the uncertainties in the estimation of physical parameters from gravitational waves generated by nonspinning binary systems and Earth-based networks of laser interferometers. The paper quantifies how the accuracy in estimating the intrinsic parameters mostly depends on the network signal to noise ratio (SNR), but the resolution in the direction of arrival also strongly depends on the network geometry. We compare results for 6 different existing and possible global networks and two different choices of the parameter space. We show how the fraction of the sky where the one sigma angular resolution is below 2 square degrees increases about 3 times when transitioning from the Hanford (USA), Livingston (USA) and Cascina (Italy) network to possible 5 sites ones (while keeping the network SNR fixed). The technique adopted here is an asymptotic expansion of the uncertainties in inverse powers of the signal to noise ratio where the first order is the inverse Fisher information matrix. We show that a common approach to use simplified parameter spaces and only the Fisher information matrix can largely underestimate the uncertainties (by a factor ~7 for the one sigma sky uncertainty in square degrees at a network SNR of ~15).
Publication Title
Physical Review D
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.104020
Publisher
American Physical Society
Required Publisher’s Statement
Please view the publisher's version of this article here
Scholarly Commons Citation
Vitale, S., & Zanolin, M. (2011). Application of Asymptotic Expansions for Maximum Likelihood Estimators' Errors to Gravitational Waves From Inspiraling Binary Systems: The Network Case. Physical Review D, 84(10). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.104020