20-107 Vaibhav Kalvakota

An Analysis of Gravitational waves (857K, LaTeX PDF) Dec 23, 20

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Abstract. The September 14, 2015 gravitational wave observations showed the inspiral of two black holes observed from Hanford and Livingston LIGO observatories. This detection was significant for two reasons: firstly, it coupled the result and avoided the possibility of a false alarm by 5σ , meaning that the detected noise was indeed from an astronomical source of gravitational waves. We will discuss the primary landscape of gravitational waves, their mathematical structure and how they can be used to predict the masses of the merger system. We will also discuss gravitational wave detector optimisations, and then we will consider the results from the detected merger GW150914. We will consider a straight-forward mathematical approach, and we will primarily be interested in the mathematical modelling of gravitational waves from General Relativity (Section 1). We will first consider a perturbed Minkowski metric, and then we will discuss the properties of the perturbation addition tensor. We will then discuss on the gravitational field tensor, and how it arises from the perturbation tensor. We will then talk about the gauge condition, essentially the gauge freedom , and then we will talk about the curvature tensor, leading eventually to the effect of gravitational waves on a ring of particles. We will consider the polarisation tensor, which maps the amplitude and polarisation details. The polarisation splits into plus polarised and cross polarised waves, which is technically the effect of a propagating gravitational wave through a ring of particles. We will then talk about the linearized Einstein Field Equations, and how the physical system of merger is encoded into the mathematical structural unity of the metric. We will then talk about the detection of these gravitational waves and how the detector can be optimised, or how the detector can be set so that any noise detected can fall in the error margins, and how the detector can prevent the interferometric photon-noise from being detected (Section 2.2). Then, we will discuss data results from the source GW150914 detection by LIGO (Section 3).

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