Enhancing the Sensitivity of Searches for Gravitational Waves from Core-Collapse Supernovae with a Bayesian classification of candidate events

Kiranjyot Gill, Wenhui Wang, Oscar Valdez, Marek Szczepanczyk, Michele Zanolin, Soma Mukherjee

Published 2018-02-19Version 1

We demonstrate how a morphological veto involving Bayesian statistics can improve the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves of the current search for core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) as implemented by the coherent Waveburst (cWB) algorithm. Examples involving two implementations of BayesWave (BW), one that makes no assumption of the polarization state of the gravitational wave (GW) and one that uses the same elliptical polarization settings adopted in previous usages for Binary systems are provided on the set of waveforms currently adopted for the first and second Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) science runs for the targeted CCSNe search. A comparison of the performance for all-sky searches versus the targeted searches with optical triggers is provided. The average cWB+BW ROC range improvements with respect to a fixed false-alarm rate (FAR) for slowly-rotating waveforms ranged from [+1.30%, +15.76%] while the improvement for rapidly-rotating waveforms were on the order of [+1.19%, +22.05%]. The application of BW to CCSN GW triggers also shows a significant reduction of the FAR while maintaining detection efficiency and remaining sensitive to a wide range of morphological CCSNe signals. It appears that the code developed for arbitrarily polarized signals outperforms the previous code for the GW morphologies tested.