A new veto for continuous gravitational wave searches

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.

10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (4)

• First low-frequency Einstein@Home all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in Advanced LIGO data
• Results of the deepest all-sky survey for continuous gravitational waves on LIGO S6 data running on the Einstein@Home volunteer distributed computing project
• An Einstein@home search for continuous gravitational waves from Cassiopeia A
• Adaptive clustering procedure for continuous gravitational wave searches

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Recent searches for continuous gravitational waves
• First low-frequency Einstein@Home all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in Advanced LIGO data
• Search methods for continuous gravitational-wave signals from unknown sources in the advanced-detector era
• Search for continuous gravitational waves from HESS~J1427-608 with a hidden Markov model
• Assessing the similarity of continuous gravitational-wave signals to narrow instrumental artifacts