QoQ: a Q-transform based test for gravitational wave transient events

Creators: Soni, Siddharth; Marx, Ethan; Katsavounidis, Erik; Essick, Reed; Cabourn Davies, G. S.; Brockill, Patrick; Ghosh, Shaon; Godwin, Patrick

Abstract

The observation of transient gravitational waves (GWs) is hindered by the presence of transient noise, colloquially referred to as glitches. These glitches can often be misidentified as GWs by searches for unmodeled transients using the excess-power type of methods and sometimes even excite template waveforms for compact binary coalescences while using matched filter techniques. They thus create a significant background in the searches. This background is more critical in getting identified promptly and efficiently within the context of real-time searches for GW transients. Such searches are the ones that have enabled multi-messenger astrophysics with the start of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo data taking in 2015 and they will continue to enable the field for further discoveries. With this work we propose and demonstrate the use of a signal-based test that quantifies the fidelity of the time-frequency decomposition of the putative signal based on first principles on how astrophysical transients are expected to be registered in the detectors and empirically measuring the instrumental noise. It is based on the Q-transform and a measure of the occupancy of the corresponding time-frequency pixels over select time-frequency volumes; we call it 'QoQ'. Our method shows a 40% reduction in the number of retraction of public alerts that were issued by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations during the third observing run with negligible loss in sensitivity. Receiver Operator Characteristic measurements suggest the method can be used in online and offline searches for transients, reducing their background significantly.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the low latency and detector characterization working groups of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for feedback while carrying out this work. We would especially like to thank Geoffrey Mo and Deep Chatterjee for their input. S S, E M and E K acknowledge support from the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) under award PHY-1764464 to the LIGO Laboratory and OAC-2117997 to the A3D3 Institute. GCD acknowledges the Science and Technology Funding Council (STFC) for funding through grant ST/T000333/1. M W Coughlin acknowledges NSF support under awards PHY-2010970 and OAC-2117997. S Ghosh acknowledges NSF support under award PHY-2110576. R Essick is supported by the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. This research has made use of data and software obtained from GWOSC (gw-openscience.org), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration, and KAGRA Collaboration. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the US NSF for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and aLIGO as well as STFC of the United Kingdom, and the Max-Planck-Society for support of the construction of aLIGO. Additional support for aLIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. aLIGO was built under award PHY-0823459. 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 PHY-1764464. The authors are grateful for computational resources provided by the LIGO Laboratory and supported by National Science Foundation Grants PHY-0757058 and PHY-0823459.

Data Availability

The data cannot be made publicly available upon publication because they are owned by a third party and the terms of use prevent public distribution. The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the authors.

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