The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration is set to launch a new observing run (O4) with upgraded instruments and other improvements. The two LIGO detectors in the United States will join at the beginning of the run with the Virgo in Europe and the KAGRA in Japan joining later. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA’s observing plans page feature an overview of the planned schedule: https://observing.docs.ligo.org/plan/#timeline.
The UBC LIGO team has been hard at work preparing for the run, including upgrades to the LIGO summary pages, a detector monitoring tool used in the LIGO control rooms and by hundreds of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA users worldwide, and improvements to key LIGO data calibration software PyDARM.
The UBC LIGO team will also be contributing two data quality assessment tools running in production for this observing run: GWSkyNet running online and GSpyNetTree running offline in the LIGO-Virgo Data Quality Report tool used by event validators. Our team is preparing to make key contributions to the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration’s analysis efforts.
We are looking forward to many exciting discoveries from this new data!
Read more from LIGO Lab news: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20230524
Image credit: Caltech/LIGO Lab.