Coherent versus coincidence detection of gravitational wave signals from compact inspiraling binaries

Abstract

We compare two multi-detector detection strategies, namely, the coincidence and the coherent, for the detection of spinless inspiraling compact binary gravitational wave (GW) signals. The coincident strategy treats the detectors as if they are isolated - com- pares individual detector statistics with their respective thresholds while the coherent strategy combines the detector network data phase coherently to obtain a single detection statistic which is then compared with a single threshold. In the case of geographically separated detectors, we also consider an enhanced coincidence strategy because the usual (naive) coincidence strategy yields poor results for misaligned detectors. For simplicity, we consider detector pairs having the same power spectral density of noise, as that of initial LIGO and also assume the noise to be stationary and Gaussian. We compare the performances of the methods by plotting the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) for the two strategies. A single astrophysical source as well as a distribution of sources is considered. We find that the coherent strategy performs better than the two coincident strategies under the assumptions of stationary Gaussian detector noise.