Search and Parameter Estimate in Gravitational Wave Data Analysis and the Fisher Matrix

Abstract

By means of next-generation ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors, real GW signals will be directly detected within a few years. In the data analysis of GWs emitted from merging compact binaries, the matched filtering method is employed in the search pipeline to identify GW events. Once a detection is made in the search, the parameter estimate seeks the physical parameters of the GW source. This pipeline repeatedly performs overlap computations by generating theoreticalwaveforms and matching those to the detector data based on Monte Carlo simulations. In this work, we briefly review the search and the parameter estimate in GW data analysis. We also introduce the Fisher matrix method that has been mainly used to predict the errors in the parameter estimates analytically. The Fisher matrix is very easy to compute and has very low computational cost compared to Monte Carlo simulations. Using the Fisher matrix, we calculate the parameter estimate errors for a nonspinning black hole - neutron star binary system. We find that the errors of the component masses for the advanced LIGO sensitivity can be smaller than those for the initial LIGO sensitivity by a factor of ~3.