A guide to LIGO-Virgo detector noise and extraction of transient gravitational-wave signals

TL;DR

This paper reviews LIGO-Virgo detector noise characteristics and data analysis methods used to detect and validate gravitational-wave signals from compact object mergers, providing insights into data quality and analysis robustness.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of detector noise properties, analysis techniques, and validation procedures, addressing concerns about data quality and analysis correctness.

Findings

Detector noise properties are well-characterized.

Data analysis methods reliably identify gravitational-wave signals.

Validation checks confirm the robustness of results.

Abstract

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have cataloged eleven confidently detected gravitational-wave events during the first two observing runs of the advanced detector era. All eleven events were consistent with being from well-modeled mergers between compact stellar-mass objects: black holes or neutron stars. The data around the time of each of these events have been made publicly available through the gravitational-wave open science center. The entirety of the gravitational-wave strain data from the first and second observing runs have also now been made publicly available. There is considerable interest among the broad scientific community in understanding the data and methods used in the analyses. In this paper, we provide an overview of the detector noise properties and the data analysis techniques used to detect gravitational-wave signals and infer the source properties. We describe some of the checks that are performed to validate the analyses and results from the observations of gravitational-wave events. We also address concerns that have been raised about various properties of LIGO-Virgo detector noise and the correctness of our analyses as applied to the resulting data.