About the Detection of Gravitational Wave Bursts

Supernovae have been historically the first envisaged sources of gravitational waves (GW). Although binary inspirals or even periodic GW emitters like pulsars seem to be nowadays more promising sources, impulsive sources of GW such as supernovae should also be considered in the data analysis design of interferometric detectors currently under construction (LIGO, VIRGO). Impulsive GW sources are typically collapses of massive stars, leading to the birth of a neutron star (type II supernova) 1,2,3 or of a black hole ; mergers of compact binaries can also be considered as impulsive sources . The problem with such sources is that the emitted waveforms are very poorly predicted, unlike the binary inspirals. As a consequence, this forbids the use of matched filtering for the detection of GW bursts. The filtering of such bursts should therefore be as general and robust as possible and with minimal a priori assumptions on the waveforms. A drawback is of course that such filters will be sensitive to non-stationary noise as well as to GW bursts; spurious events, e.g. generated by transient noise, should be eliminated afterwards when working in coincidence with other detectors. But, on the other hand, burst filters could help to identify and understand these noise sources, which would be useful especially during the commissioning phase of the detector. All the filters presented here are dedicated to GW bursts detection and are compared by studying their performance to detect a reference sample of GW burst signals, numerically computed by Zwerger and Müller (ZM). Throughout the following, we assume that the detector noise is white, stationary and Gaussian with zero mean. For numerical estimates, we chose the flat (ampli-