A guide to LIGO-Virgo detector noise and extraction of transient gravitational-wave signals

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. Abbott, S. Abraham, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, V. Adya, C. Affeldt and 1,125 more. 2019

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have cataloged eleven confidently detected gravitational-wave events during the first two observing runs of the advanced detector era. All eleven events were consistent with being from well-modeled mergers between compact stellar-mass objects: black holes or neutron stars. The data around the time of each of these events have been made publicly available through the gravitational-wave open science center. The entirety of the gravitational-wave strain data from the first and second observing runs have also now been made publicly available. There is considerable interest among the broad scientific community in understanding the data and methods used in the analyses. In this paper, we provide an overview of the detector noise properties and the data analysis techniques used to detect gravitational-wave signals and infer the source properties. We describe some of the checks that are performed to validate the analyses and results from the observations of gravitational-wave events. We also address concerns that have been raised about various properties of LIGO-Virgo detector noise and the correctness of our analyses as applied to the resulting data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4ae0a9cb92124412ebe25239b705fe221f3cddc

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Citations in the corpus

Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, background): “The third observing run may yield O(102) additional observations (Abbott et al. 2018b), with a second binary neutron star merger signal already confirmed (Abbott et al. 2020c) and an additional binary black hole merger (Abbott et al. 2020a).”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “[177], we assume that the noise can be treated as Gaussian, stationary, and uncorrelated between detectors [63,178] in the stretch of data used to calculate the likelihood and to measure the noise PSD.”
The MBTA pipeline for detecting compact binary coalescences in the third LIGO–Virgo observing run (2020, background): “D 85 122006 [20] R. Abbott et al. 2020 Phys.”
Open Data from the Third Observing Run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO (2023, methodology): “An overview of LIGO / Virgo detector noise and some applicable signal processing methods are described in Abbott et al. ( 2020c ) ; see also above in Sections 3.2 and 2.3 for a brief introduction to various classes of detector noise.”
Open data from the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2019, unknown): “3 and 4, the data contain spectral lines that can complicate searches for signals in those frequency bands [132].”
GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “The ringdown-dominated signals of high-mass BBH mergers can be mimicked by waveforms from the collapse of cosmic strings (Abbott et al. 2020f; Au-rrekoetxea et al. 2024) and collisions of exotic compact objects (e.g. boson stars) (Calder´on Bustillo et al. 2021b; Siemonsen & East 2023; Evstafyeva…”
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): “This noise is assumed to be Gaussian, stationary and uncorrelated between pairs of detectors [136, 137], as further discussed in Sec.”