Analysis framework for the prompt discovery of compact binary mergers in gravitational-wave data

By C. Messick, Kent Blackburn, Patrick R. Brady, P. Brockill, K. Cannon, R. Cariou, S. Caudill, S. Chamberlin, Jolien D. E. Creighton, R. Everett and 17 more. 2016

245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a stream-based analysis pipeline to detect gravitational waves from the merger of binary neutron stars, binary black holes, and neutron-star–black-hole binaries within ∼1 min of the arrival of the merger signal at Earth. Such low-latency detection is crucial for the prompt response by electromagnetic facilities in order to observe any fading electromagnetic counterparts that might be produced by mergers involving at least one neutron star. Even for systems expected not to produce counterparts, low-latency analysis of the data is useful for deciding when not to point telescopes, and as feedback to observatory operations. Analysts using this pipeline were the first to identify GW151226, the second gravitational-wave event ever detected. The pipeline also operates in an offline mode, in which it incorporates more refined information about data quality and employs acausal methods that are inapplicable to the online mode. The pipeline’s offline mode was used in the detection of the first two gravitational-wave events, GW150914 and GW151226, as well as the identification of a third candidate, LVT151012.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2d9f624be3f110fd71ae46e9d5c81d4e8961c39

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Citations in the corpus

Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, background): “We place particular emphasis on the coalescence of BNS systems, which are the GW source for which electromagnetic follow-up is most promising (Metzger and Berger 2012; Patricelli et al. 2016; Paschalidis 2017; Rosswog et al. 2017; Metzger 2017).”
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).”
Tests of general relativity with the binary black hole signals from the LIGO-Virgo catalog GWTC-1 (2019, methodology): “Second, we choose to produce combined constraints only from events that were found in both modeled searches (PYCBC [45–47] and GSTLAL [48,49]) with a FAR of at most one per one thousand years.”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “[93] P. Godwin et al., Incorporation of Statistical Data Quality Information into the GstLAL Search Analysis, Technical Report No.”
Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger (2017, methodology): “Approximately 6 minutes later, a gravitational-wave candidate (later designated GW170817) was registered in low latency(Cannon et al. 2012; Messick et al. 2017) based on a single-detector analysis of the Laser Interferometer Gravitationalwave Observatory (LIGO)Hanford data.”
The MBTA pipeline for detecting compact binary coalescences in the third LIGO–Virgo observing run (2020, unknown): “X arXiv:2010.14527 [11] C. Messick et al. 2017 Phys.”
Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in Dense Star Clusters: The Role of Binary–Binary Encounters (2018, methodology): “Furthermore, matched-filtering searches for GWs do not utilize eccentric templates (Usman et al. 2016; Messick et al. 2017), necessitating methods of detection that are promising but significantly less effective than matched-filtering (Tai et al. 2014; Coughlin et al. 2015; Tiwari et al. 2016;…”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, methodology): “…threshold on S/N does not directly account for the empirical distributions of astrophysical and noise triggers and does not have a direct correspondence with the detection statistic used by the GW searches to rank significance of triggers(Messick et al. 2017; Nitz et al. 2017; Abbott et al. 2018a).”
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, methodology): “III, we used the same methods and data products as reported for GWTC-2 [8].”
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): “A largely independent matched-filter pipeline based on the GstLAL library [9,10] (henceforth GstLAL) also performs a matched-filter search for CBC signals.”