SETI Detection Strategies for Single Dish Radio Telescopes

Radio Searches for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence aim at detecting artificial transmissions from extra terrestrial communicative civilizations. The lack of prior knowledge concerning these potential transmissions increase the search parameter space. Ground-based single dish radio telescopes offer high sensitivity, but standard data products are limited to power spectral density estimates. To overcome important classical energy detector limitations, two detection strategies based on asynchronous ON and OFF astronomical target observations are proposed. Statistical models are described to enable threshold selection and detection performance assessment

A Bayesian approach to the follow-up of candidate gravitational wave signals

Ground-based gravitational wave laser interferometers (LIGO, GEO-600, Virgo and Tama-300) have now reached high sensitivity and duty cycle. We present a Bayesian evidence-based approach to the search for gravitational waves, in particular aimed at the followup of candidate events generated by the analysis pipeline. We introduce and demonstrate an efficient method to compute the evidence and odds ratio between different models, and illustrate this approach using the specific case of the gravitational wave signal generated during the inspiral phase of binary systems, modelled at the leading quadrupole Newtonian order, in synthetic noise. We show that the method is effective in detecting signals at the detection threshold and it is robust against (some types of) instrumental artefacts. The computational efficiency of this method makes it scalable to the analysis of all the triggers generated by the analysis pipelines to search for coalescing binaries in surveys with ground-based interferometers, and to a whole variety of signal waveforms, characterised by a larger number of parameters.Comment: 9 page