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arXiv · 1707.05268

A new veto for continuous gravitational wave searches

Sylvia J. Zhu·Maria Alessandra Papa·Sinéad Walsh
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Abstract

We present a new veto procedure to distinguish between continuous gravitational wave (CW) signals and the detector artifacts that can mimic their behavior. The veto procedure exploits the fact that a long-lasting coherent disturbance is less likely than a real signal to exhibit a Doppler modulation of astrophysical origin. Therefore, in the presence of an outlier from a search, we perform a multi-step search around the frequency of the outlier with the Doppler modulation turned off (DM-off), and compare these results with the results from the original (DM-on) search. If the results from the DM-off search are more significant than those from the DM-on search, the outlier is most likely due to an artifact rather than a signal. We tune the veto procedure so that it has a very low false dismissal rate. With this veto, we are able to identify as coherent disturbances >99.9% of the 6349 candidates from the recent all-sky low-frequency Einstein@Home search on the data from the Advanced LIGO O1 observing run [1]. We present the details of each identified disturbance in the Appendix.

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Sylvia J. Zhu, Maria Alessandra Papa, Sinéad Walsh. 2017-09-11. A new veto for continuous gravitational wave searches. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.96.124007

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