Spherical gravitational wave detectors: An approach for real time data analysis

Abstract

We have developed a full model to simulate spherical detectors where all main sources of noise are considered. We have built a computer code for determining the source direction and the wave polarization (solution of the inverse problem) in real time acquisition. The digital filter used is a simple bandpass filter. The ``data'' used for testing our code was simulated, which considers both the source signal and detector noise. The detector noise includes the antenna thermal, back action, phase noise, series noise and thermal from transducer coupled masses. The simulated noise takes into account all these noises and the antenna-transducers coupling. The detector transfer function was calculated for a spherical antenna with six two-mode parametric transducers. From the results we determined that spherical detectors are able to locate an astrophysical source in the sky in real time as long as the signal-to-noise ratio for a burst signal is equal to or higher than 3.