Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2019
Abstract
There has been much recent interest in studying anisotropies in the astrophysical gravitational-wave (GW) background, as these could provide us with interesting new information about galaxy clustering and large-scale structure. However, this information is obscured by shot noise, caused by the finite number of GW sources that contribute to the background at any given time. We develop a new method for estimating the angular spectrum of anisotropies, based on the principle of combining statistically-independent data segments. We show that this gives an unbiased estimate of the true, astrophysical spectrum, removing the offset due to shot noise power, and that in the limit of many data segments, it is the most efficient (i.e., lowest-variance) estimator possible.
Recommended Citation
Jenkins, Alexander C., Joseph D. Romano, and Mairi Sakellariadou. "Estimating the angular power spectrum of the gravitational-wave background in the presence of shot noise." Physical Review D 100.8 (2019): 083501. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.083501
Publication Title
Physical Review D
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevD.100.083501
Comments
© 2019 American Physical Society