Realtime search for compact binary mergers in Advanced LIGO and Virgo's third observing run using PyCBC Live

TL;DR

This paper discusses the enhancements to PyCBC Live, a low-latency gravitational-wave search algorithm, enabling rapid detection and reporting of compact binary mergers during LIGO and Virgo's third observing run.

Contribution

It details the improvements made to PyCBC Live after the second run, optimizing its performance for real-time detection during the third run.

Findings

PyCBC Live successfully detected multiple gravitational-wave candidates.

Improvements increased detection speed and accuracy.

The system enabled prompt alerts for follow-up observations.

Abstract

The third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo took place between April 2019 and March 2020 and resulted in dozens of gravitational-wave candidates, many of which are now published as confident detections. A crucial requirement of the third observing run has been the rapid identification and public reporting of compact binary mergers, which enabled massive followup observation campaigns with electromagnetic and neutrino observatories. PyCBC Live is a low-latency search for compact binary mergers based on frequency-domain matched filtering, which has been used during the second and third observing runs, together with other low-latency analyses, to generate these rapid alerts from the data acquired by LIGO and Virgo. This paper describes and evaluates the improvements made to PyCBC Live after the second observing run, which defined its operation and performance during the third observing run.