Optical and Near-Infrared Searches for Gravitational Waves: Exploring Efficiencies

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is able to detect ripples in spacetime caused by a binary black hole or binary neutron star mergers known as gravitational waves (GW). We are focused on multi-messenger astronomy, or having multiple sources of the same event to provide insight into what the object is, where it is from, etc. GW events can have an electromagnetic (EM) counterpart in the form of kilonovae, which can be seen optically using a telescope. In our project, we aimed to test the efficiency of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at detecting kilonovae. We populate a skymap with kilonovae, and test how many kilonovae ZTF can detect compared to how many we simulated. Originally, we were using a software called simsurvey to test these efficiencies. The goal of this project was to update our code from simsurvey, which is no longer being maintained, to skysurvey. Additionally, we plan on testing effiecienes of events from the LIGO O4 run.