Application of a Zero-latency Whitening Filter to Compact Binary Coalescence Gravitational-wave Searches

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a zero-latency whitening filter for gravitational-wave detection, demonstrating it maintains signal integrity and detection metrics comparable to traditional methods, thus enabling faster GW event identification.

Contribution

It introduces and tests a zero-latency whitening filter that reduces detection latency without compromising signal detection accuracy.

Findings

Zero-latency filter reproduces SNR effectively.

Excellent agreement in chi-squared discriminator values.

Potential for faster GW detection pipelines.

Abstract

Joint electromagnetic and gravitational-wave (GW) observation is a major goal of both the GW astronomy and electromagnetic astronomy communities for the coming decade. One way to accomplish this goal is to direct follow-up of GW candidates. Prompt electromagnetic emission may fade quickly, therefore it is desirable to have GW detection happen as quickly as possible. A leading source of latency in GW detection is the whitening of the data. We examine the performance of a zero-latency whitening filter in a detection pipeline for compact binary coalescence (CBC) GW signals. We find that the filter reproduces signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) sufficiently consistent with the results of the original high-latency and phase-preserving filter for both noise and artificial GW signals (called "injections"). Additionally, we demonstrate that these two whitening filters show excellent agreement in $\chi^2$ value, a discriminator for GW signals.