Detector characterization

A detector that’s sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves is also highly sensitive to other disturbances, including instrumental and environmental noise that can contaminate or sometimes appear to be gravitational-wave signals. To deliver clean gravitational-wave data to enable astrophysical inference, the LIGO detectors must be well understood and characterized. In addition to recording gravitational-waves, LIGO also records over 200,000 other streams of auxiliary data at each site. With this large amount of data, we at MIT are involved in statistical inference of noise, studies to help determine couplings between auxiliary channels and the main gravitational-wave channel, as well as machine learning efforts to remove known noise artifacts from gravitational-wave signals.