Glitches far from transient gravitational-wave events do not bias inference
Abstract
Non-Gaussian noise in gravitational-wave detectors, known as “glitches,” can bias the inferred parameters of transient signals when they occur nearby in time and frequency. These biases are addressed with a variety of methods that remove or otherwise mitigate the impact of the glitch. Given the computational cost and human effort required for glitch mitigation, we study the conditions under which it is strictly necessary. We consider simulated glitches and gravitational-wave signals in various configurations that probe their proximity both in time and in frequency. We determine that glitches located outside the time-frequency space spanned by the gravitational-wave model prior and with a signal-to-noise ratio, conservatively, below 50 do not impact estimation of the signal parameters.
Copyright and License
© 2025 American Physical Society.
Acknowledgement
Thank you to Colm Talbot, Reed Essick, Jacob Golomb, Lucy Thomas, and Ryan Magee for useful discussions about the imrphenomxphm waveforms systematics. Thank you to Eliot Finch for help with determining the time-frequency location of the waveform ringdown. Thank you to Derek Davis for their expertise on glitches and glitch mitigation. Thank you to Jane Glanzer and Siddharth Soni for help with glitch rate estimates as a function of SNR. S. H. was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1745301. K. C. was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-2409001. This material is based upon work supported by NSF’s LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation, and operates under cooperative Agreement No. PHY-2309200. The authors are grateful for computational resources provided by the LIGO Laboratory and supported by National Science Foundation Grants No. PHY-0757058 and No. PHY-0823459.
Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this article are openly available [38].
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2506.21869 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Dataset: https://git.ligo.org/lscsoft/bayeswave (URL)
Funding
- National Science Foundation
- DGE-1745301
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2409001
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309200
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-0757058
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-0823459
Dates
- Accepted
-
2025-09-19