Mitigating the effects of instrumental artifacts on source localizations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an inpainting-based method to mitigate instrumental artifacts in gravitational-wave data, improving source localization accuracy and enabling detection of electromagnetic counterparts.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel inpainting technique to remove instrumental artifacts from gravitational-wave data and correct for biases in source localization.

Findings

Method effectively localizes signals after data removal

Reduces bias caused by instrumental artifacts

Robust across various signal types and parameters

Abstract

Instrumental artifacts in gravitational-wave strain data can overlap with gravitational-wave detections and significantly impair the accuracy of the measured source localizations. These biases can prevent the detection of any electromagnetic counterparts to the detected gravitational wave. We present a method to mitigate the effect of instrumental artifacts on the measured source localization. This method uses inpainting techniques to remove data containing the instrumental artifact and then correcting for the data removal in the subsequent analysis of the data. We present a series of simulations using this method using a variety of signal classes and inpainting parameters which test the effectiveness of this method and identify potential limitations. We show that in the vast majority of scenarios, this method can robustly localize gravitational-wave signals even after removing portions of the data. We also demonstrate how an instrumental artifact can bias the measured source location and how this method can be used to mitigate this bias.