Theory of the Detection of Short Bursts of Gravitational Radiation

Abstract

It is argued that the short bursts of gravitational radiation which Weber reports most probably arise from the gravitational collapse of a body of stellar mass or the capture of one collapsed object by another. In both cases the bulk of the energy would be emitted in a burst lasting about a millisecond, during which the Riemann tensor would change sign from one to three times. The signal-to-noise problem for the detection of such bursts is discussed, and it is shown that by observing fluctuations in the phase or amplitude of the Brownian oscillations of a quadrupole antenna one can detect bursts which impart to the system an energy of a small fraction of $\mathrm{kT}$. Applied to Weber's antenna, this method could improve the sensitivity for reliable detection by a factor of about 12. However, by using an antenna of the same physical dimensions but with a much tighter electromechanical coupling, one could obtain an improvement by a factor of up to 250. The tighter coupling would also enable one to determine the time of arrival of the bursts to within a millisecond. Such time resolution would make it possible to verify that the radiation was propagating with the velocity of light and to determine the direction of the source.