Detecting Binary Compact-object Mergers with Gravitational Waves: Understanding and Improving the Sensitivity of the PyCBC Search

By Alexander H. Nitz, T. Dent, T. Dal Canton, Stephen Fairhurst, Duncan A. Brown. 2017

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an improved search for binary compact-object mergers using a network of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors. We model a volumetric, isotropic source population and incorporate the resulting distribution over signal amplitude, time delay, and coalescence phase into the ranking of candidate events. We describe an improved modeling of the background distribution, and demonstrate incorporating a prior model of the binary mass distribution in the ranking of candidate events. We find an ∼ 10 % and ∼ 20 % increase in detection volume for simulated binary neutron star and neutron star black hole systems, respectively, corresponding to a reduction of the false alarm rates assigned to signals by between one and two orders of magnitude.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f1cff711a1ec14e06988ae1ea8c9e5504e847c9

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, methodology): “Using the SNR, the results of these two vetoes, and a fitting and smoothing procedure designed to ensure that the rate of single-detector triggers is approximately constant across the search parameter space, a single-detector rank % was calculated for each single-detector trigger [70].”
• Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, methodology): “In the O2 analysis, PyCBC uses an improved detection statistic (Nitz et al. 2017).”
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “The PyCBC full parameter space and BBH focused searches differ in how their ranking statistics are calculated: For the full search [127], a threshold of 7.”
• 4-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Mergers (2021, background): “Candidate Selection and Significance Candidates are assigned a ranking statistic value according to their S/N, consistency with the expected signal morphology (Allen 2005; Nitz 2018), and coherence between observing detectors (Nitz et al. 2017; Davies et al. 2020).”
• Where Are LIGO’s Big Black Holes? (2017, methodology): “H E ] 2 8 N ov 2 01 by the intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) modeled search (Nitz et al. 2017; Messick et al. 2017; Dal Canton & Harry 2017), and IMBHs of even higher mass can be detected by the unmodeled transient search (Klimenko et al. 2008; Abbott et al. 2017a).”
• GWTC-2.1: Deep extended catalog of compact binary coalescences observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first half of the third observing run (2021, unknown): “Five pipelines were used in real time to analyze O3 data; a minimally modeled generic transient search (coherent WaveBurst [97 – 101]), and four matched-filter [51,52] pipelines (GstLAL [48 – 50], MBTA [56], PyCBC [53 – 55, 102] , and We present here results from a refined offline search of O3a.”
• Gravitational Waves and Gamma-rays from a Binary Neutron Star Merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A (2017, methodology): “The first targeted search (Harry & Fairhurst 2011; Williamson et al. 2014; Abbott et al. 2017b; Nitz et al. 2017a) assumes that the source is a BNS or NS–BH binary merger and is located at the sky-position observed for the optical counterpart to GW170817 and GRB170817A (Coulter et al. 2017a, 2017b;…”
• The MBTA pipeline for detecting compact binary coalescences in the third LIGO–Virgo observing run (2020, unknown): “113 [32] LIGO-Virgo Public Alerts User Guide https://emfollow.docs.ligo.org/userguide/index.html [33] A. H. Nitz et al. 2017 Astrophys.”
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, methodology): “To calculate á ñVT i from injections into the PyCBC detection pipeline, we consider injections to be “detected” if they have a detection statistic ñ 8, where ñ is the statistic used in the PyCBC analysis of O2 data(Nitz et al. 2017; Abbott et al. 2018a).”
• 2-OGC: Open Gravitational-wave Catalog of Binary Mergers from Analysis of Public Advanced LIGO and Virgo Data (2019, methodology): “This probability distribution p(~θ|S) is calculated by a Monte Carlo method similarly to Nitz et al. (2017).”
• Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M ⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star (2024, background): “…GstLAL (Messick et al. 2017; Sachdev et al. 2019; Hanna et al. 2020; Cannon et al. 2021; Ewing et al. 2023; Tsukada et al. 2023), MBTA (Adams et al. 2016; Aubin et al. 2021) and PyCBC (Allen et al. 2012; Allen 2005; Dal Canton et al. 2021; Usman et al. 2016; Nitz et al. 2017; Davies et al. 2020).”
• GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “It was first detected by PyCBC Live, a matched-filter search for compact binaries (Allen 2005; Usman et al. 2016; Nitz et al. 2017; Dal Canton et al. 2021).”