Gravitational wave burst vetoes in the LIGO S2 and S3 data analyses

TL;DR

This paper details the analysis of LIGO's S2 and S3 data to identify environmental noise transients and develop vetoes, improving the reliability of gravitational wave burst detection.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for analyzing auxiliary channels to establish data quality and identify vetoes for non-astrophysical transients in LIGO data.

Findings

Identification of environmental noise transients correlated with detector data

Development of vetoes that reduce false burst detections

Enhanced understanding of noise characteristics in LIGO data

Abstract

The LIGO detectors collected about 4 months of data in 2003-2004 during two science runs, S2 and S3. Several environmental and auxiliary channels that monitor the instruments' physical environment and overall interferometric operation were analyzed in order to establish the quality of the data as well as the presence of transients of non-astrophysical origin. This analysis allowed better understanding of the noise character of the instruments and the establishment of correlations between transients in these channels and the one recording the gravitational wave strain. In this way vetoes for spurious burst were identified. We present the methodology we followed in this analysis and the results from the S2 and S3 veto analysis within the context of the search for gravitational wave bursts.