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Abstract

The output of gravitational-wave interferometers, such as LIGO and Virgo, can
be highly non-stationary. Broadband detector noise can affect the detector
sensitivity on the order of tens of seconds. Gravitational-wave transient
searches, such as those for colliding black holes, estimate this noise in order
to identify gravitational-wave events. During times of non-stationarity we see
a higher rate of false events being reported. To accurately separate signal
from noise, it is imperative to incorporate the changing detector state into
gravitational-wave searches. We develop a new statistic which estimates the
variation of the interferometric detector noise. We use this statistic to
re-rank candidate events identified during LIGO-Virgo's second observing run by
the PyCBC search pipeline. This results in a 7% improvement in the sensitivity
volume for low mass binaries, particularly binary neutron stars mergers.