Random projections for the reduction of gravitational wave template banks

Project Summary

The direct observation of gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo detectors is one of the breakthrough discoveries of the beginning of the 21st century. Matched filtering techniques have shown to be very effective for searching for gravitational signals in the LIGO and Virgo data (dominated by instrumental noise). Matched filtering consists in correlating the data with a set of waveform templates (called bank) that provides a discrete sampling covering the entire relevant astrophysical parameter space. Template banks capable for covering the accessible parameter space typically include 500,000 waveforms. Correlating with this many templates thus represents a large computing cost. The goal of this work is to investigate ways to reduce the gravitational-wave template banks through random projections and to perform this reduction efficiently using Optical Processing Units.

Eric Chassande-Mottin