Fisher Information Velocity: A New Geometric Channel for Precision Glitch Identification in Gravitational-Wave Detectors
Abstract
Gravitational-wave detectors operate in inherently non-stationary environments, requiring robust detector characterization (DetChar) to distinguish instrumental transients from astrophysical signals. Traditional DetChar frameworks typically rely on morphological classifiers or energy-based projections, such as band-limited root-mean-square (BLRMS) metrics, which can conflate global amplitude scaling with physical reconfigurations of the spectrum. In this work, we introduce Fisher information velocity, a novel geometric channel that models the detector's power spectral density (PSD) as a point on a Riemannian manifold. By tracking the kinematic drift of the noise floor and utilizing exterior algebra to calculate tangent divergence (sin θ), we mathematically decouple simple energy surges from spectral warps, or differential redistributions of power across frequency bands. Applying this framework via the sgn-drift streaming pipeline to ~40 hours of high-cadence Advanced LIGO O4a data, we evaluate N=282,080 independent manifold velocity samples. High-resolution phase space mapping reveals a bimodal taxonomy of severe instrumental non-stationarity, classifying events into structural pivots (87.2%) and isotropic surges (12.8%). Among co-detected events, the geometric channel achieves higher significance than standard BLRMS monitors in 74% of cases with a median sensitivity ratio of Γ= 1.65. The two channels detect largely non-overlapping populations, increasing the total anomaly catalog by 87% over BLRMS alone. Systematic validation on 10 confirmed GWTC-4.0 events and ~5,000 simulated injections demonstrates robust insensitivity to astrophysical signals, establishing this geometric channel as a sensitive, complementary, and veto-safe diagnostic for current and next-generation detector networks.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{kennington2026fisher,
title = {{Fisher Information Velocity: A New Geometric Channel for Precision Glitch Identification in Gravitational-Wave Detectors}},
author = {James Kennington and Zach Yarbrough},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.21531},
eprint = {2605.21531},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21531},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Fisher Information Velocity: A New Geometric Channel for Precision Glitch Identification in Gravitational-Wave Detectors
AU - James Kennington
AU - Zach Yarbrough
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.21531
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21531
AB - Gravitational-wave detectors operate in inherently non-stationary environments, requiring robust detector characterization (DetChar) to distinguish instrumental transients from astrophysical signals. Traditional DetChar frameworks typically rely on morphological classifiers or energy-based projections, such as band-limited root-mean-square (BLRMS) metrics, which can conflate global amplitude scaling with physical reconfigurations of the spectrum. In this work, we introduce Fisher information velocity, a novel geometric channel that models the detector's power spectral density (PSD) as a point on a Riemannian manifold. By tracking the kinematic drift of the noise floor and utilizing exterior algebra to calculate tangent divergence (sin θ), we mathematically decouple simple energy surges from spectral warps, or differential redistributions of power across frequency bands. Applying this framework via the sgn-drift streaming pipeline to ~40 hours of high-cadence Advanced LIGO O4a data, we evaluate N=282,080 independent manifold velocity samples. High-resolution phase space mapping reveals a bimodal taxonomy of severe instrumental non-stationarity, classifying events into structural pivots (87.2%) and isotropic surges (12.8%). Among co-detected events, the geometric channel achieves higher significance than standard BLRMS monitors in 74% of cases with a median sensitivity ratio of Γ= 1.65. The two channels detect largely non-overlapping populations, increasing the total anomaly catalog by 87% over BLRMS alone. Systematic validation on 10 confirmed GWTC-4.0 events and ~5,000 simulated injections demonstrates robust insensitivity to astrophysical signals, establishing this geometric channel as a sensitive, complementary, and veto-safe diagnostic for current and next-generation detector networks.
ER -