Detection of anomalies amongst LIGO's glitch populations with autoencoders

Understand

Gravitational-wave (GW) interferometers are able to detect a change in distance of $\sim$ 1/10,000th the size of a proton.

• Such sensitivity leads to large appearance rates of non-Gaussian transient noise bursts in the main detector strain, also known as glitches.
• These glitches come in a wide range of frequency-amplitude-time morphologies and are caused by environmental or instrumental processes, hindering searches for all sources of gravitational waves.
• Current approaches for their identification use supervised models to learn their morphology in the main strain, but do not consider relevant information provided by auxiliary channels that monitor the state of the interferometers nor provide a flexible framework for novel glitch morphologies.