A new veto for continuous gravitational wave searches

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new veto method for continuous gravitational wave searches that effectively distinguishes real signals from detector artifacts by analyzing Doppler modulation patterns, significantly reducing false positives.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel veto procedure leveraging Doppler modulation analysis to improve the reliability of continuous gravitational wave candidate identification.

Findings

Successfully identified >99.9% of disturbances in a large candidate set

Reduces false alarms in gravitational wave searches

Enhances confidence in detected signals

Abstract

We present a new veto procedure to distinguish between continuous gravitational wave (CW) signals and the detector artifacts that can mimic their behavior. The veto procedure exploits the fact that a long-lasting coherent disturbance is less likely than a real signal to exhibit a Doppler modulation of astrophysical origin. Therefore, in the presence of an outlier from a search, we perform a multi-step search around the frequency of the outlier with the Doppler modulation turned off (DM-off), and compare these results with the results from the original (DM-on) search. If the results from the DM-off search are more significant than those from the DM-on search, the outlier is most likely due to an artifact rather than a signal. We tune the veto procedure so that it has a very low false dismissal rate. With this veto, we are able to identify as coherent disturbances >99.9% of the 6349 candidates from the recent all-sky low-frequency Einstein@Home search on the data from the Advanced LIGO O1 observing run [1]. We present the details of each identified disturbance in the Appendix.