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Free keywords:
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc, Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM,Mathematics, General Topology, math.GN
Abstract:
In hierarchical searches for continuous gravitational waves, clustering of
candidates is an important postprocessing step because it reduces the number of
noise candidates that are followed-up at successive stages [1][7][12]. Previous
clustering procedures bundled together nearby candidates ascribing them to the
same root cause (be it a signal or a disturbance), based on a predefined
cluster volume. In this paper, we present a procedure that adapts the cluster
volume to the data itself and checks for consistency of such volume with what
is expected from a signal. This significantly improves the noise rejection
capabilities at fixed detection threshold, and at fixed computing resources for
the follow-up stages, this results in an overall more sensitive search. This
new procedure was employed in the first Einstein@Home search on data from the
first science run of the advanced LIGO detectors (O1) [11].