Speaker
Description
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) is currently the most prolific detector of Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs), including short-duration GRBs (sGRBs). Recently the detection rate of sGRBs has been increased dramatically through the use of ground-based searches to analyze untriggered GBM continuous time tagged event (CTTE) data. Motivated by the possibility that sGRBs are caused by compact binary mergers that also produce gravitational waves, the GBM team has developed a method to search CTTE data for transient events in temporal coincidence with a LIGO/Virgo compact binary coalescence trigger. This targeted search operates by looking for a coherent signal in all 14 GBM detectors over a variety of timescales by using spectral templates which are convolved with the GBM detector responses. I will review recent improvements to the targeted search pipeline and discuss its enhanced capabilities at detecting sub-threshold transient signals associated with LIGO/Virgo triggers. I will also discuss the role of the targeted search in finding a possible GBM counterpart to GW150914 and will compare that signal to other known astrophysical transients that can be recovered from the untriggered GBM data using this method.
