2025/07/16 by LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Virgo Collaboration, KAGRA Collaboration · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Computer Science · #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.12374
We present a search for short-duration gravitational-wave transients in data from the first eight months of Advanced LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's fourth observing run, denoted O4a. We use four analyses which are sensitive to a wide range of potential signals lasting up to a few seconds in the 16-4096 Hz band. Excluding binary black hole merger candidates that were already identified by low-latency analyses, we find no statistically significant evidence for other gravitational-wave transients. We measure the sensitivity of the search for representative signals, including sine-Gaussians, Gaussian pulses, and white-noise bursts with different frequencies and durations, adopting a false alarm rate of 1 per 100 years as detection threshold. Depending on signal type, we find improvements over previous searches by factors of 2 to 10 in terms of sensitivity to strain amplitude and of 90% confidence upper limit on the rate density of sources. We also evaluate a variety of core-collapse supernova models and find that, for some models, the search could have detected gravitational waves from stellar core-collapse throughout the Milky Way. Finally, we consider neutron star f-modes associated with pulsar glitches and find that, assuming a source similar to the Vela Pulsar, the search could have detected a gravitational-wave signal from a glitch with fractional frequency change as small as ∼ 2 to 6 × 10-5 depending on the neutron star mass.