Winter 2024 Mary Gates Research Award

Congrats to Carol Miu who received a scholarship from the Mary Gates Endowment for Students in winter quarter. This scholarship provides $5,000 disbursed over two quarters and is intended to enhance the educational experiences of undergraduates while they are engaged in research guided by faculty.

Carol Miu

Major in Physics, mentored by Dr. Joey Key, Associate Professor, and Dr. Ansel Neunzert, Lecturer, in Physical Sciences Division

Comparing Narrow Spectral Artifact Line Finders to Enable Continuous Wave Searches in LIGO
Continuous gravitational waves (CW) from sources such as a non-axisymmetric spinning neutron star have not yet been detected. If CW from neutron stars exist, the weak signals could be hidden within noise. The search for CW signals is impeded by the presence of narrow spectral artifacts (lines) caused by instrumentation or the environment at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). Better identification of line noise would make a detection more likely, and a detection has the potential to expand our current knowledge of neutron stars. A non-machine learning (non-ML) line finding algorithm is currently used on a daily basis at the LIGO Hanford and Livingston Observatories. A different approach to line finding developed at the University of Washington Bothell utilizes a machine learning (ML) algorithm. My research uses both the ML and non-ML line finding methods, comparing the accuracy and efficiency of these two methods applied to various data sets.