Large scale gravitational wave searches in NANOGrav Data

Eliu Huerta Escudero, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Roland Haas, Cunwei Fan, Nathaniel Garver-Daniels, Eliu Huerta Escudero, A. Miguel Holgado, Stephen Taylor, Shawn Rosofsky, Jacob Turner, Jeffrey Hazboun, Sarah Vigeland, Caitlin Witt, Nihan Pol, Michele Vallisneri

The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black hole (BBH) mergers and the first binary neutron star (BNS) inspirals by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European advanced Virgo detector has ushered in a revolution in astrophysics. These groundbreaking discoveries have provided conclusive evidence that stellar mass BBHs form and coalesce within the age of the universe  and that their astrophysical properties  are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Similarly, BNS mergers have been identified as the central engines of short gamma ray bursts (sGRBs) where about half of all elements heavier than iron are produced.

The NCSA Gravity Group has played a critical role to showcase the versatility and flexibility of the Blue Waters supercomputer to advance GW Astronomy. Over the last year, a team led by the NCSA Gravity Group and the Blue Waters Application and Systems Group connected the LIGO Data Grid to the Blue Waters supercomputer. This novel computational framework came into production during the last several weeks of the second discovery campaign of the LIGO and Virgo detectors and played a significant role in the validation of the first multi-messenger detection of two colliding neutron stars.

Supporting high throughput LIGO data analysis workflows concurrently with highly parallel numerical relativity simulations is the most recent success and most complex example of successfully achieving convergence on Blue Waters. The NCSA Gravity Group has also spearheaded the use of Blue Waters for GW searches in the context of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs).

We will devote the allocation to: (i) numerical relativity simulations of BHs and NSs to construct template waveforms for the detection of GWs in LIGO and Virgo data; (ii) large scale gravitational wave searches for the validation of GW discoveries with LIGO and PTA data; and (iii) furthering our pioneering work on the development of artificial intelligence algorithms for the detection and characterization of GWs and its extension to identify in real-time electromagnetic counterparts of GW signals using Dark Energy Survey data.