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GWs from Acoustic Supernova | |||
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Core-collapse supernovae are expected to produce gravitational waves in the frequency band of current (and future) ground
based detectors. Unfortunately for the GW community the mechanism which causes the star to explode is not understood,
denying analysis efforts of reliable waveforms. This renders impossible the use of the most effective method for detecting
weak signals - matched filtering.
Recently (Burrows et al, 2006) a new supernova mechanism has been proposed which relies on acoustic waves generated from g-mode oscillations of the proto-neutron star core. These acoustic waves have been shown to generically dissociate the star and, although unconfirmed, this new mechanism contains promising features which not only match expectations based on optical observations of these types of events, but also produces copious amounts of gravitational radiation around a few hundred to ~1000 Hz (Ott et al, 2006). Our aim is to adapt existing search techniques to be specifically tuned to GWs emitted from acoustic supernovae. This should improve LIGO's sensitivity to these type of events (if they do indeed occur) and demonstrate how incorporating information from astrophysical models can aid in the detection and characterization of gravitational waves. | |||
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| Strain spectral density of GWs generated from acoustic supernova of different progenitors placed at 10 kpc near the galactic center. These waveforms are plotted against the LIGO and Advanced LIGO noise curves to demonstrate the optimism that a galactic supernova may be detectable. | Spectrogram of the loudest of the modeled acoustic supernova. The distinct tracks seen in the time-frequency plot are qualitatively common for GWs from simulations beginning with different progenitors. These features could in turn be used to enhance the sensitivity to, and constrain the reconstruction of, such waveforms. | ||
Montana State University
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406.994.1677
littenberg@physics.montana.edu