Spectrogram correlated stacking: A novel time-frequency domain analysis of the stochastic gravitational wave background

The astrophysical stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) originates from numerous faint subthreshold gravitational wave (GW) signals arising from the coalescing binary compact objects. This background is expected to be discovered from the current (or next-generation) network of GW detectors by cross-correlating the signal between multiple pairs of GW detectors. However, detecting this signal is challenging and the correlation is only detectable at low frequencies due to the arrival time delay between different detectors. In this work, we propose a novel technique, Spectrogram Correlated Stacking (SpeCS), which goes beyond the usual cross-correlation (and to higher frequencies) by exploiting the higher-order statistics in the time-frequency domain which accounts for the chirping nature of the individual events that comprise SGWB. We show that SpeCS improves the signal-to-noise for the detection of SGWB by a factor close to 8, compared to standard optimal cross-correlation methods which are tuned to measure only the power spectrum of the SGWB signal. SpeCS can probe beyond the power spectrum and its application to the GW data available from the current and next-generation GW detectors would speed up the SGWB discovery.