Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Physics
Specialization
Astrophysics
Department
Physics
First Advisor
Robert Coyne
Abstract
There are a multitude of astrophysical sources which carry the potential to produce perturbations in spacetime, known as gravitational waves, across a wide spectrum of frequencies. Over the brief history of gravitational wave astronomy, short-duration “chirp” signals emitted from black hole mergers, highly energetic “burst” signals emitted from supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), and long duration “continuous” signals emitted from galactic neutron stars and the stochastic gravitational wave background have traditionally been at the forefront of search development, leaving a class of intermediate duration ($102 - 104 seconds) gravitational wave signals poorly suited for detection. The conventional way to improve search efficiencies for a gravitational wave signal is to localize it in the noisy data set using a matched filter, which works very well for the precisely modeled, short-duration chirp signals. However, given the required model accuracy and computational cost of matched filtered searches, performing them on the less precisely modeled, longer duration signals in the intermediate regime is inherently problematic. Despite this, signals in this regime present interesting multi-messenger astronomy observation opportunities that could illuminate the mechanisms behind unexplained electromagnetic observations if a coincident gravitational wave signal were detected. Here, we develop a general method of constructing template banks for intermediate duration gravitational waves, which addresses the difficulties of using conventional construction methods with them, to be used in semi-coherent gravitational wave searches in order to optimize detectability with ground-based gravitational wave detectors.
Recommended Citation
St. Pierre, Michael, "GENERATING TEMPLATE BANKS FOR INTERMEDIATE DURATION GRAVITATIONAL WAVES" (2026). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 4561.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/4561