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Ground-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors are a frontier large-scale experiment in experimental astrophysics. Given the elusive nature of GWs, the ground-based detectors have complex interacting systems made up of exquisitely sensitive instruments which makes them susceptible to terrestrial noise sources. As these noise transients - termed as glitches - appear in the detector's main data channel, they can mask or mimic real GW signals resulting in false alarms in the detection pipelines. Given their high rate of occurrence compared to astrophysical signals, it is vital to examine these glitches and probe their origin in the detector's environment and instruments in order to possibly eliminate them from the science data. In this paper we present a tensor factorization-based data mining approach to finding witness events to these glitches in the network of heterogeneous sensors that monitor the detectors and build a catalog which can aid human operators in diagnosing the sources of these noise transients. Available from: https://openreview.net/forum?id=O9q0ma6Oh5e
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Hidden in Plain Sight: Discerning Signal from Noise in the Expanded Laboratory Environment
What happens when disturbances in precision measurement instruments are indecipherable to physicists despite extensive review of the instruments and their outputs? How do physicists parse instrument outputs to discern sought-after signals from noise that originates from the surrounding natural and built environments, either masking or mimicking these desired signals? I argue that given the extreme sensitivity of the laser interferometers used by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect minute length deformations caused by gravitational waves, physicists reconceptualized their traditional laboratory spaces to include the surrounding natural and built environments. Discerning signal from noise in instruments operating close to their low noise floors necessitate an epistemic shift that combines the laboratory with the surrounding natural and built environments beyond its walls through the epistemic space of the “expanded laboratory environment.”
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- Award ID(s):
- 1946555
- PAR ID:
- 10559161
- Publisher / Repository:
- Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, University of California Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1939-1811
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 335 to 364
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- gravitational waves laboratory, environment disturbance noise stillness expanded laboratory environment
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2024.54.3.335
