Localization of Gravitational Sources from Time-Frequency Maps

Abstract

The localization of Gravitational Waves (GW) sources, that is key in identifying their physical nature via the joint use of GW interferometers and other companion instruments, is mainly based on the observed delays between each pair of interferometers. In this scenario, Time-Frequency (TF) representations are widely used for GW detection and measurements, as the time delays between two detected GWs can be estimated by suitably aligning the related TF maps. In this work we adopt the Phase Correlation method for TF maps alignment, and compare different TF representations (i.e., Continuous Q Transform, Wigner-Ville Distribution, Smoothed Wigner-Ville and Sparsified Wigner-Ville) in terms of time delay estimation performance.