CRA Seminar: Sophie Hourihane (Caltech)

Title: Glitches get stitches: The effect non-transient noise in LIGO detectors on astrophysical inference, and what to do about it

Abstract: Ground-based gravitational-wave detector networks have detected a deluge of compact-binary events in the years since the original 2015 detection. Far more often than these events (approximately every two minutes), detectors experience transient, non-gaussian noise events (glitches). When the noise model is misspecified due to these glitches, parameter estimation results can be biased, or even wrong entirely. I present a method to mitigate this bias by modeling the glitch and the compact binary waveform together. I focus on a case study of GW200129, an event overlapping a glitch with a contentious interpretation of its precession.