Omicron: A tool to characterize transient noise in gravitational-wave detectors

Abstract

The Omicron software is a tool developed to perform a multi-resolution time–frequency analysis of data from gravitational-wave detectors: the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors. Omicron generates spectrograms from whitened data streams, offering a visual representation of transient detector noises and gravitational-wave events. In addition, these events can be parameterized with an optimized resolution. They can be written to disk to conduct offline noise characterization and gravitational-wave event validation studies. Omicron is optimized to process, in parallel, thousands of data streams recorded by gravitational-wave detectors. The Omicron software plays an important role in vetting gravitational-wave detection candidates and characterization of transient noise.

Keywords

• Gravitational waves
• Transient noise
• Spectrogram
• LIGO–Virgo