Gravitational Wave Observartions In Non-Stationary Detector Noise*

As ground based interferometers continue to improve in sensitivity, especially at low frequencies, and with the advent of future space based interferometers, the duration that gravitational wave signals spend in the sensitive band of the detectors will increase. The assumption that the noise can be treated as approximately stationary breaks down for these long duration signals, and analyses that assume stationarity will produce biased results. The biases can be removed by properly modeling the non-stationary behaviour using wavelet domain, time-frequency modeling of the data and signals.