Recovering Hardware Injections in LIGO S5 Data

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Abstract:: The LIGO Scientific Collaboration will release to the public the LIGO archival data set, which contains data taken at design sensitivity from 11/2005 through 10/2007. The LIGO Open Science Center will provide online access to this data, as well as documentation and tools to guide the user through working with it. In preparation for next year’s release, we create and document a worked-out example of accessing and analyzing the LIGO Open Data Set to search for compact-binary-coalescence signals. We also create updated documentation characterizing hardware injections, which are compact-binary-coalescence signals physically injected into the data using magnetic actuators on detector mirrors. Our search generates compact-binary-coalescence templates using well-modeled waveforms and performs a matched-filter search to identify hardware injections. We test for accuracy by comparing the signal-to-noise ratio expected according to documentation created during data collection to the signal-to-noise ratio we recover using our search. We are able to recover the vast majority of the 1492 injections marked as successful. Through our search, we also identify and characterize injections that are not recovered with the expected signal-to-noise ratio, and we update the injection documentation to reflect our findings.

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LIGO Document G1400005-v5