Coherent network analysis technique for discriminating gravitational-wave bursts from instrumental noise

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust coherence-based analysis method for gravitational-wave detectors that effectively distinguishes true signals from transient noise artifacts without prior knowledge of the waveform.

Contribution

The paper presents a new consistency test for gravitational-wave burst detection that is resilient to non-stationary noise, improving reliability over existing methods.

Findings

Enhanced discrimination between signals and noise transients

Robustness against non-stationary noise in detector data

No need for prior waveform information

Abstract

Existing coherent network analysis techniques for detecting gravitational-wave bursts simultaneously test data from multiple observatories for consistency with the expected properties of the signals. These techniques assume the output of the detector network to be the sum of a stationary Gaussian noise process and a gravitational-wave signal, and they may fail in the presence of transient non-stationarities, which are common in real detectors. In order to address this problem we introduce a consistency test that is robust against noise non-stationarities and allows one to distinguish between gravitational-wave bursts and noise transients. This technique does not require any a priori knowledge of the putative burst waveform.