# Search for gravitational-wave bursts in LIGO data from the fourth science run

## TL;DR

This paper reports a search for short-duration gravitational-wave bursts in LIGO's fourth science run data, achieving improved sensitivity and setting upper limits on burst rates without detecting any signals.

## Contribution

It introduces a search method with enhanced sensitivity for gravitational-wave bursts and provides the first upper limits based on the fourth science run data.

## Key findings

- No gravitational-wave bursts detected in 15.5 days
- Sensitivity several times better than previous searches
- Upper limit of 0.15 bursts per day at 90% confidence

## Abstract

The fourth science run of the LIGO and GEO 600 gravitational-wave detectors, carried out in early 2005, collected data with significantly lower noise than previous science runs. We report on a search for short-duration gravitational-wave bursts with arbitrary waveform in the 64-1600 Hz frequency range appearing in all three LIGO interferometers. Signal consistency tests, data quality cuts, and auxiliary-channel vetoes are applied to reduce the rate of spurious triggers. No gravitational-wave signals are detected in 15.5 days of live observation time; we set a frequentist upper limit of 0.15 per day (at 90% confidence level) on the rate of bursts with large enough amplitudes to be detected reliably. The amplitude sensitivity of the search, characterized using Monte Carlo simulations, is several times better than that of previous searches. We also provide rough estimates of the distances at which representative supernova and binary black hole merger signals could be detected with 50% efficiency by this analysis.