Gandhinagar:A team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) have made a significant contribution to the LIGO discovery of the heaviest binary neutron star systemGW190425. The results of this discovery were recently announced and presented at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.The team at IITGN lead by Prof AnandSengupta, Assistant Professor, Physics,included PhD student in Physics discipline, MrSoumen Roy and BTech student (batch of 2013)MrNilayThakor.
IITGN’s PhD student MrSoumen Royhas been made an author inthe researchstudysubmitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters that is authored by an international team comprised of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration, as a recognition for his contributions to this discovery. Soumen’s research paper, written in collaboration with a B.Tech Mechanical Engineering student NilayThakor (batch of 2013), under the guidance of Prof AnandSengupta, provided a key modulefor the search that resulted in this significant discovery.
The IIT Gandhinagar group created and provided a highly optimized template bank for both the online (low-latency) and offline LIGOsearch pipelines, a key component of the search,which was then used in the advanced-LIGO O3 searcheswhich lead to this discovery.
What are template banks?
A template bank is a grid of theoretical signal shapes against which the noisy data is matched, so as to reliably extract faint signals which may lie buried therein. The challenge was to create the smallest footprint in terms of the bank size while making sure that there was adequate coverage to astrophysical signals and that there were no “holes” left in the search space. The team drew inspiration fromLord Kelvin’s famous “sphere-covering” problem to map the task at hand to its geometrical analogue.
Sharing his thoughts on this discovery and achievement of his students,Prof AnandSengupta, Assistant Professor, Physics, IITGN, said,“The discovery of systems like GW190425 poses new challenges in astrophysics. It would steer the attention of researchers to find new formation channels of such unusual systems. Science is exciting because of the unknowns that you stumble upon – and here is a big one.I am elated that my students made this critical contribution to this discovery. It is also satisfying that undergraduate students can make cutting-edge scientific contributions through collaborative research.”
Elatedby this achievement, Soumen Roy, PhD student in Gravitational Wave astronomy, IITGN, expressed,“I am very excited to see my work featured in the recent detection of the gravitational-wave signal from the merger of the most massive binary neutron star system. I was involved with every aspect of developing and testing the optimized template placement algorithm that was used in the LIGO search pipelines, a task that has taken more than half of the tenure of my PhD! In future, I would like to work on devising new tests of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using gravitational-wave observations of compact binary coalescences.”
Equally delighted, NilayThakor, a B.Tech alumnus of IITGN from 2013 batch of MechanicalEngineering, said,“It is inspiring to see what started as an undergraduate research project to be featured in the detection of neutron star collision. It is very encouraging for my further work, as it was my first publication. In future, I am interested in examining what role artificial intelligence could play in improving the detection of gravitational waves.”
Soumen Roy is finishing his PhD thesis at IITGN and preparing for a stint as a postdoctoral researcher.NilayThakor is now an MS student in Applied Math and Statistics at Johns Hopkins University, USA.
