Effect of sine-Gaussian glitches on searches for binary coalescence

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how sine-Gaussian glitches affect gravitational wave searches for binary coalescence, providing analytical estimates and simulations to understand trigger behavior and improve veto procedures.

Contribution

It offers new analytical models and validation methods for understanding the impact of sine-Gaussian glitches on matched filter gravitational wave searches.

Findings

Analytical estimates of trigger SNR and time based on glitch parameters.

Validation of models through numerical simulations with noiseless sine-Gaussians.

Identification of parameter space regions where models are accurate.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of an important class of glitches occurring in the detector data on matched filter searches of gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries in the advanced detector era. The glitches, which can be modeled as sine-Gaussians, can produce triggers with significant time delays and thus have important bearing on veto procedures as will be described in the paper. We provide approximated analytical estimates of the trigger SNR and time as a function of the parameters describing the sine-Gaussian (center time, center frequency and Q-factor) and the inspiral waveform (chirp mass). We validate our analytical predictions through simple numerical simulations, performed by filtering noiseless sine-Gaussians with the inspiral matched filter and recovering the time and value of the maximum of the resulting SNR time series. Although we identify regions of the parameter space in which each approximation no longer reproduces the numerical results, the approximations complement each other and together effectively cover the whole parameter space.