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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Application Of Asymptotic Expansions For Maximum Likelihood Estimators Errors To Gravitational Waves From Binary Mergers: The Single Interferometer Case, M. Zanolin, S. Vitale, N. Makris Jun 2010

Application Of Asymptotic Expansions For Maximum Likelihood Estimators Errors To Gravitational Waves From Binary Mergers: The Single Interferometer Case, M. Zanolin, S. Vitale, N. Makris

Publications

In this paper we describe a new methodology to calculate analytically the error for a maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) for physical parameters from gravitational wave signals. All the existing literature focuses on the usage of the Cramer Rao Lower bounds (CRLB) as a mean to approximate the errors for large signal to noise ratios. We show here how the variance and the bias of an MLE estimate can be expressed instead in inverse powers of the signal to noise ratios where the first order in the variance expansion is the CRLB. As an application we compute the second order of …


Photometric Calibrations For 21st Century Science, Stephen M. Kent, Terry D. Oswalt, Mary Elizabeth Kaiser, Et Al. Mar 2009

Photometric Calibrations For 21st Century Science, Stephen M. Kent, Terry D. Oswalt, Mary Elizabeth Kaiser, Et Al.

Publications

The answers to fundamental science questions in astrophysics, ranging from the history of the expansion of the universe to the sizes of nearby stars, hinge on our ability to make precise measurements of diverse astronomical objects. As our knowledge of the underlying physics of objects improves along with advances in detectors and instrumentation, the limits on our capability to extract science from measurements is set, not by our lack of understanding of the nature of these objects, but rather by the most mundane of all issues: the precision with which we can calibrate observations in physical units. We stress the …