arXiv subjects

Jessica McIver

Publications and source records attributed to Jessica McIver.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Omicron: a tool to characterize transient noise in gravitational-wave detectors

The Omicron software is a tool developed to perform a multi-resolution time-frequency analysis of data from gravitational-wave detectors: the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors. Omicron generates spectrograms from whitened data streams, offering a visual representation of transient detector noises and gravitational-wave events. In addition, these events can be parameterized with an optimized resolution. They can be written to disk to conduct offline noise characterization and gravitational-wave event validation studies. Omicron is optimized to process, in parallel, thousands of data streams recorded by gravitational-wave detectors. The Omicron software plays an important role in vetting gravitational-wave detection candidates and characterization of transient noise.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

Mitigation of the instrumental noise transient in gravitational-wave data surrounding GW170817

In the coming years gravitational-wave detectors will undergo a series of improvements, with an increase in their detection rate by about an order of magnitude. Routine detections of gravitational-wave signals promote novel astrophysical and fundamental theory studies, while simultaneously leading to an increase in the number of detections temporally overlapping with instrumentally- or environmentally-induced transients in the detectors (glitches), often of unknown origin. Indeed, this was the case for the very first detection by the LIGO and Virgo detectors of a gravitational-wave signal consistent with a binary neutron star coalescence, GW170817. A loud glitch in the LIGO-Livingston detector, about one second before the merger, hampered coincident detection (which was initially achieved solely with LIGO-Hanford data). Moreover, accurate source characterization depends on specific assumptions about the behavior of the detector noise that are rendered invalid by the presence of glitches. In this paper, we present the various techniques employed for the initial mitigation of the glitch to perform source characterization of GW170817 and study advantages and disadvantages of each mitigation method. We show that, despite the presence of instrumental noise transients louder than the one affecting GW170817, we are still able to produce unbiased measurements of the intrinsic parameters from simulated injections with properties similar to GW170817.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2018

Generating Event Triggers Based on Hilbert-Huang Transform and Its Application to Gravitational-Wave Data

We present a new event trigger generator based on the Hilbert-Huang transform, named EtaGen ($η$Gen). It decomposes a time-series data into several adaptive modes without imposing a priori bases on the data. The adaptive modes are used to find transients (excesses) in the background noises. A clustering algorithm is used to gather excesses corresponding to a single event and to reconstruct its waveform. The performance of EtaGen is evaluated by how many injections in the LIGO simulated data are found. EtaGen is viable as an event trigger generator when compared directly with the performance of Omicron, which is currently the best event trigger generator used in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2012

Data Quality Studies of Enhanced Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors

Data quality assessment plays an essential role in the quest to detect gravitational wave signals in data from the LIGO and Virgo interferometric gravitational wave detectors. Interferometer data contains a high rate of noise transients from the environment, the detector hardware, and the detector control systems. These transients severely limit the statistical significance of gravitational wave candidates of short duration and/or poorly modeled waveforms. This paper describes the data quality studies that have been performed in recent LIGO and Virgo observing runs to mitigate the impact of transient detector artifacts on the gravitational wave searches.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2011

A hierarchical method for vetoing noise transients in gravitational-wave detectors

Non-Gaussian noise transients in interferometric gravitational-wave detectors increase the background in searches for short-duration and un-modelled signals. We describe a method for vetoing noise transients by ranking the statistical relationship between triggers in auxiliary channels that have negligible sensitivity to gravitational waves and putative gravitational-wave triggers in the detector output. The novelty of the algorithm lies in its hierarchical approach, which leads to a minimal set of veto conditions with high performance and low deadtime. After a given channel has been selected it is used to veto triggers from the detector output, then the algorithm selects a new channel that performs well on the remaining triggers and the process is repeated. This method has been demonstrated to reduce the background in searches for transient gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations.

gr-qc↗