Detecting Gravitational Waves with Generative AI

Instruments used to detect Gravitational Waves (GWs), like LIGO, are very sensitive, making them susceptible to noise (vibrations in the mirrors, earthquakes, and even traffic!). This makes it difficult to differentiate between real GWs and noise.

The above figure shows 3 different signals from both LIGO detectors (Hanford and Livingston): the first two are noise, and the bottom one is a real GW signal. It is difficult to distinguish them by eye.

In this project, I used a normalizing flow — a generative AI model that can parameterize unknown distributions — to learn the noise distribution. Once learned, it can be used to detect GWs by looking for outliers in the data.