Coincidence techniques for gravitational wave experiments

A new method is proposed for coincidence analyses of gravitational wave data. It consists in taking the sum of the signals of the two (or more) antennas, finding its distribution and comparing it with the distribution of the sum that is obtained when the data set of one antenna is shifted by a time δt with respect to the other set. If the two antennas are identical, the standard coincidence method is better. But the new method has to be preferred to the standard one, whenever the signals produced by a gravitational wave pulse in the two (or more) antennas differ by more than a factor 1.5. This is very likely because of differences in the antenna resonance frequencies and because of the different location and orientation of the antennas on the Earth