Data Quality Studies of Enhanced Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors

TL;DR

This paper reviews data quality assessment efforts in LIGO and Virgo to identify and mitigate noise transients that hinder gravitational wave detection, improving the reliability of search results.

Contribution

It presents recent data quality studies and mitigation strategies for transient noise artifacts in gravitational wave detector data.

Findings

Identification of key noise transient sources

Implementation of mitigation techniques

Enhanced detection confidence for gravitational wave signals

Abstract

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.