LIGO detector characterization in the second and third observing runs

By D. Davis, J. Areeda, B. Berger, R. Bruntz, A. Effler, R. Essick, R. Fisher, P. Godwin, E. Goetz, A. Helmling-Cornell and 276 more. Classical and quantum gravity, 2021

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The characterization of the Advanced LIGO detectors in the second and third observing runs has increased the sensitivity of the instruments, allowing for a higher number of detectable gravitational-wave signals, and provided confirmation of all observed gravitational-wave events. In this work, we present the methods used to characterize the LIGO detectors and curate the publicly available datasets, including the LIGO strain data and data quality products. We describe the essential role of these datasets in LIGO–Virgo Collaboration analyses of gravitational-waves from both transient and persistent sources and include details on the provenance of these datasets in order to support analyses of LIGO data by the broader community. Finally, we explain anticipated changes in the role of detector characterization and current efforts to prepare for the high rate of gravitational-wave alerts and events in future observing runs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4afd2a35aef61cedeaf1142a606573fe53e55563

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Citations in the corpus

4-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Mergers (2021, methodology): “Our analysis also makes use of the data quality information compiled by the LVK detector characterization teams (Davis et al. 2021) to exclude times around hardware signal injections and times affected by adverse instrumental behavior.”
Open Data from the Third Observing Run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO (2023, methodology): “A summary of efforts to characterize data quality in O3 can be seen in Davis et al. ( 2021 ) for Advanced LIGO, Acernese et al. ( 2022a, 2022c ) for Advanced Virgo, and Abe et al. ( 2022 ) for KAGRA.”
Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M ⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star (2024, background): “Detection vetting procedures similar to those of past GW candidates (Davis et al. 2021; Abbott et al. 2016b), when applied to GW230529, find no evidence that instrumental or environmental artifacts (Helmling-Cornell et al. 2023; Nguyen et al. 2021; Effler et al. 2015) could have caused GW230529.”
GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “…established for O4a (Soni et al. 2025), including broadband noise sub-traction (Vajente et al. 2020) and data-quality report analysis routines (Davis et al. 2021), detector data surrounding the event were evaluated for signs of non-Gaussian excess power (glitches) within the target…”
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, background): “LIGO and Virgo data quality is continuously monitored during an observing run both on site and remotely, as reported in [86, 87].”