Early warning of coalescing neutron-star and neutron-star-black-hole binaries from nonstationary noise background using neural networks

TL;DR

This paper presents neural network methods to improve early warning detection of neutron star mergers in gravitational-wave data by reducing nonstationary noise and enabling prompt alerts.

Contribution

It introduces a neural network approach that simultaneously enhances low-frequency sensitivity and mitigates nonstationary noise in LIGO data for early detection of neutron star mergers.

Findings

Neural networks reduce nonlinear noise by about a factor of 5.

Detects binary neutron stars 100 seconds before merger at 40 Mpc.

Detects neutron-star-black-holes 10 seconds before merger at 160 Mpc.

Abstract

The success of the multi-messenger astronomy relies on gravitational-wave observatories like LIGO and Virgo to provide prompt warning of merger events involving neutron stars (including both binary neutron stars and neutron-star-black-holes), which further depends critically on the low-frequency sensitivity of LIGO as a typical binary neutron star stays in this band for minutes. However, the current sub-60 Hz sensitivity of LIGO has not yet reached its design target and the excess noise can be more than an order of magnitude below 20 Hz. It is limited by nonlinearly coupled noises from auxiliary control loops which are also nonstationary, posing challenges to realistic early-warning pipelines. Nevertheless, machine-learning-based neural networks provide ways to simultaneously improve the low-frequency sensitivity and mitigate its nonstationarity, and detect the real-time gravitational-wave signal with a very short computational time. We propose to achieve this by inputting both the main gravitational-wave readout and key auxiliary witnesses to a compound neural network. Using simulated data with characteristic representing the real LIGO detectors, our machine-learning-based neural networks can reduce nonlinearly coupled noise by about a factor of 5 and allows a typical binary neutron star (neutron-star-black-hole) to be detected 100 s (10 s) before the merger at a distance of 40 Mpc (160 Mpc). If one can further reduce the noise to the fundamental limit, our neural networks can achieve detection out to a distance of 80 Mpc and 240 Mpc for binary neutron stars and neutron-star-black-holes, respectively. It thus demonstrates that utilizing machine-learning-based neural networks is a promising direction for the timely detection of the coalescence of electromagnetically bright LIGO/Virgo sources.