Coordination is key to imaging the earliest optical counterparts of GW events

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LIGO-G1100983-v3
30 Oct 2011, 23:10

Abstract:: Electromagnetic followup of gravitational wave events is a challenging problem. The antenna patterns of interferometric detectors result in probability sky maps that are generally multimodal and dispersed over 4pi. We demonstrate that successful optical imaging requires rapidly planning and executing multiple coordinated observations by a network of telescopes. In a Bayesian framework, we calculate the optimum telescope tiling that maximizes either the probability of observing the EM counterpart at least once or exactly once. We present a case study comparing several approximate solutions of this optimization problem. Each algorithm is subjected to realistic Monte Carlo simulations of detection candidates to determine the probability of successfully imaging the source.

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Notes and Changes:: Added QR code and arXiv reference; unhyphenated text in flow chart

LIGO Document G1100983-v5