International Summer Research Program in Gravitational-Wave Physics:
Research Experiences for Undergraduates around the world



INFN and Università di Pisa
  • Study of multichannel correlations between noise and environmental data in Virgo:
    The analysis of correlations between the interferometer noise and signals coming from environmental sensors (seismometers, magnetometers etc.) is important for understanding the mechanisms which couple external fluctuations to the channel used for the detection of gravitational waves. In the simples case, correlations may be linear, but more complicated and interesting scenarios can exist, for example modulations. In this project it is proposed to investigate such kind of correlations using three different data analysis tools:
    - - multicoherence, which is a multichannel generalization of the usual coherence
    - - principal component analysis, which is a generic name for a class of methods aimed at the extraction of one or more statistically independent components from a set of time series
    - - multibicoherence, which is a multichannel generalization of the usual bicoherence.
    Code to perform this kind of analysis within the virgo environment is approaching its implementation phase, and will be avaliable for validation at the time of the project. Code validation is one of the principal motivations of the project. Another is to stimulate interaction with the detector experts, in order to provide a physical interpretation of the results.
    Mentors: Giancarlo Cella
    Related Project 2009: "Detecting and Characterizing Nonlinear Signal Components in VIRGO Data Channels"


Past IREU Projects
Other Prior Projects