B. U. Gadre

An Enhanced Method for Scheduling Observations of Large Sky Error Regions for Finding Optical Counterparts to Transients

The discovery and subsequent study of optical counterparts to transient sources is crucial for their complete astrophysical understanding. Various gamma ray burst (GRB) detectors, and more notably the ground--based gravitational wave detectors, typically have large uncertainties in the sky positions of detected sources. Searching these large sky regions spanning hundreds of square degrees is a formidable challenge for most ground--based optical telescopes, which can usually image less than tens of square degrees of the sky in a single night. We present algorithms for optimal scheduling of such follow--up observations in order to maximize the probability of imaging the optical counterpart, based on the all--sky probability distribution of the source position. We incorporate realistic observing constraints like the diurnal cycle, telescope pointing limitations, available observing time, and the rising/setting of the target at the observatory location. We use simulations to demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform the default greedy observing schedule used by many observatories. Our algorithms are applicable for follow--up of other transient sources with large positional uncertainties, like Fermi--detected GRBs, and can easily be adapted for scheduling radio or space--based X--ray followup.

A unified approach to χ2 discriminators for searches of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences

We describe a general mathematical framework for

Hierarchical search strategy for the efficient detection of gravitational waves from non-precessing coalescing compact binaries with aligned-spins

\chi^2

Detection and characterization of spin-orbit resonances in the advanced gravitational wave detectors era

discriminators in the context of the compact binary coalescence search. We show that with any