Understanding Gravitational Waves from Inspiral Binary Systems and its Detection

Javier M. Antelis, Claudia Moreno

Published 2016-10-12Version 1

The discovery of the events GW150926 and GW151226 has experimentally confirmed the existence of gravitational waves (GW) and has demonstrated the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems. This finding marks the beginning of a new era that will reveal unexpected features of our universe. This work presents a basic insight to the fundamental theory of GW emitted by inspiral binary systems and describes the scientific and technological efforts developed to measure this waves using the interferometer-based detector called LIGO. Subsequently, the work proposes a comprehensive data analysis methodology based on the matched filter algorithm which aims to detect GW signals emitted by inspiral binary systems of astrophysical sources. The method is validated with freely available LIGO data which contain injected GW signals. Results of experiments performed to assess detection carried out show that the method was able to recover the 85% of the injected GW.