ArchEnemy: removing scattered-light glitches from gravitational wave data

Abstract

Abstract Data recorded by gravitational wave detectors includes many non-astrophysical transient noise bursts, the most common of which is caused by scattered-light within the detectors. These so-called ‘glitches’ in the data impact the ability to both observe and characterize incoming gravitational wave signals. In this work we use a scattered-light glitch waveform model to identify and characterize scattered-light glitches in a representative stretch of gravitational wave data. We identify 2749 scattered-light glitches in 5.96 days of LIGO-Hanford data and 1306 glitches in 5.93 days of LIGO-Livingston data taken from the third LIGO-Virgo observing run. By subtracting identified scattered-light glitches we demonstrate an increase in the sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search for binary black hole signals by ∼ 1 % .