ON THE EFFICIENCY OF THE COINCIDENCE SEARCH IN GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE EXPERIMENTS

We discuss the problem of the detection of gravitational waves (gw) si gnals with small energy signal to noise ratio (SNR). We consider coinc idence experiments between data processed by optimum Biters matched to delta-like bursts. It is shown, by calculation and by simulation, tha t, because of the noise, the ''event'' lists produced by the same sign als on different detectors, using the same filters, overlap only parti ally - about 30 percent for SNR close to the threshold used for defini ng the events. Furthermore, because of the noise, the correlation of t he event energy between identical detectors is weak and cannot be used as a strong discriminator against noise in coincidence search, even f or SNR = 10 or more.