This SGER provides half the support for a postdoc to work on the application of the Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) to data for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The postdoc will work closely with co-PI Dr. Jordan Camp at the Goddard Space Flight Center. This project will have two main areas: (1) Application of the HHT to LIGO detector characterization to study nonlinear and instrumental transient effects at a level of detail that is fundamentally unavailable to Fourier or wavelet analysis. This includes development HHT detector characterization software and its installation at the LIGO sites supervised by PI Prof. Peter Shawhan; (2) Application of the HHT to the burst detection search for short, frequency modulated waveforms, such as the black hole binary merger signal. The postdoc supported half-time through this award will be co-supported by NASA for closely related research relevant to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). A vital area of LIGO research is the development of data analysis algorithms to characterize detector noise and search for transient signals. The data analysis effort is urgent as LIGO now undertakes the one year S5 science run at full design sensitivity. The HHT is a novel method of time-frequency analysis recently developed at NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center that is specifically targeted to the analysis of transient, non-linear signals. The HHT is adaptive and does not decompose data into a fixed basis set, and therefore it is not limited by the time-frequency uncertainty relation characteristic of Fourier or wavelet analysis. Thus the HHT can provide very high time and frequency resolution of gravitational wave data, leading to a significant impact in both instrumental characterization and signal detection.
