Detectability-Aware Screening of Post-Merger Gravitational-Wave Damping Anomalies in Real Detector Noise: A Graph-Spectral Approach with Empirical Null Calibration
Abstract
A two-stage methodological proof of concept for screening simplified post-merger gravitational-wave damping anomalies in real LIGO Livingston noise is presented. The injected signal is a controlled damped-sinusoid proxy rather than a physically complete binary-neutron-star post-merger waveform; it is used to test statistical detectability and damping-time scoring under real-noise calibration. Stage 1 constructs a local time-frequency graph from Constant-Q representations of whitened candidate windows and uses the leading eigenvalue as a detectability statistic, with its null distribution calibrated empirically on real detector noise. Stage 2 estimates an effective damping-time score for Stage-1-passing candidates using nonlinear least squares and an interpretable ridge/energy-decay estimator, with thresholds fixed before final held-out evaluation. The matched-filter SNR convention is checked with synthetic Gaussian noise, while the graph statistic is assessed through power-comparison and tile-shuffling tests. On a held-out real-noise test block, the nonlinear least-squares Stage-2 score gives AUC = 0.943 and TPR = 0.879 at FPR = 0.012, outperforming a calibrated power-only baseline.
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BibTeX
@misc{alaskarov2026detectabilityaware,
title = {{Detectability-Aware Screening of Post-Merger Gravitational-Wave Damping Anomalies in Real Detector Noise: A Graph-Spectral Approach with Empirical Null Calibration}},
author = {Ruslan Alaskarov},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.00095},
eprint = {2609.00095},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00095},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Detectability-Aware Screening of Post-Merger Gravitational-Wave Damping Anomalies in Real Detector Noise: A Graph-Spectral Approach with Empirical Null Calibration
AU - Ruslan Alaskarov
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.00095
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00095
AB - A two-stage methodological proof of concept for screening simplified post-merger gravitational-wave damping anomalies in real LIGO Livingston noise is presented. The injected signal is a controlled damped-sinusoid proxy rather than a physically complete binary-neutron-star post-merger waveform; it is used to test statistical detectability and damping-time scoring under real-noise calibration. Stage 1 constructs a local time-frequency graph from Constant-Q representations of whitened candidate windows and uses the leading eigenvalue as a detectability statistic, with its null distribution calibrated empirically on real detector noise. Stage 2 estimates an effective damping-time score for Stage-1-passing candidates using nonlinear least squares and an interpretable ridge/energy-decay estimator, with thresholds fixed before final held-out evaluation. The matched-filter SNR convention is checked with synthetic Gaussian noise, while the graph statistic is assessed through power-comparison and tile-shuffling tests. On a held-out real-noise test block, the nonlinear least-squares Stage-2 score gives AUC = 0.943 and TPR = 0.879 at FPR = 0.012, outperforming a calibrated power-only baseline.
ER -