An independent search of gravitational waves in the first observation run of advanced LIGO using cross-correlation

Abstract

This work describes a template-free method to search gravitational waves (GW) using data from the LIGO observatories simultaneously. The basic idea of this method is that a GW signal is present in a short-duration data segment if the maximum correlation-coefficient between the strain signals is higher than a significant threshold and its time difference is lower than the 10 ms of inter-observatory light propagation time. Hence, this method can be used to carry out blind searches of any types of GW irrespective of the waveform and of the source type and sky location. An independent search of injected and real GW signals from compact binary coalescences (CBC) contained in the first observation run (O1) of advanced LIGO was carried out to asses its performance. On the basis of the results, the proposed method was able to detect GW produced by binary systems without making any assumption about them.