Graduate Research
Zhanerke Turymtay
Title: “Influence of Denoising on the Gravitational Wave Signature from Core-Collapse Supernovae"
Mentor: Dr. Soma Mukherjee
In 2017, three researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in detecting gravitational waves. The recipients are Rainer Weiss, a physics professor at MIT, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, who are both physics professors at Caltech.
The data are obtained from the LIGO interferometers. The interferometer is a device which exploits interference phenomena to measure small displacements. These data consist of signals and noises. Some examples of noise sources are: seismic noise, thermal noise, quantum noise, gas noise, charging noise, electronics noise, magnetic disturbances, human activities and other sources. In order to detect the gravitational wave signal, the following data conditioning steps must be done: whitening–making samples uncorrelated and reducing dynamic range; cleaning–removing narrowband noise, aka lines; filtering–choosing appropriate frequency band, and reducing power in the other bands.
While the data conditioning steps reduce noise, we need to be certain that any signals present in the data do not get corrupted by such processing. Gravitational wave from supernovae are weak. So, it is important to explore the effect of data conditioning as described above and other related de-noising processes.