Gravitational waves are constantly passing us. However, even the strongest waves that come from merging black holes have a tiny effect on the arms of the gravitational wave detectors on Earth. They stretch and squeeze them by a thousand of the width of a proton.
You will search for gravitational waves in LIGO-Virgo data to find short unknown signals. You will demonstrate the potential of the maximum entropy method to determine the properties of exotic, unknown signals. This technique recovers coherent signals from a network of gravitational wave detectors. It assumes that signal behaves differently from noise, i.e., that the signal is correlated at different detectors in the network, while the noise is uncorrelated. You will learn numerical methods, noise modelling, some of the mathematics behind the data analysis, and practice on real detector data. You will start by reconstructing very short events of possible exotic origin like GW190521.
Requirements: linear algebra, python, complex analysis