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Coherent WaveBurst (cWB) is a data analysis pipeline designed for detection and reconstruction of gravitational-wave (GW) transients with the worldwide network of GW detectors. By using wavelets, it explores the data time-frequency structure and finds generic GW signals with weak (or none) assumptions on the source model.
cWB has been in active development since 2003 and it has been used to analyze all scientific data collected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration ever since. On September 14, 2015, the cWB low-latency search detected the first gravitational-wave event, GW150914, a merger of two black holes (LVC link). More recently, cWB played a major role in the discovery of the first intermediate-mass black-hole, GW190521 (LVC link); it also contributed to the measurement of inspiral higher order modes on GW190814 (LVC link). Coherent WaveBurst has been extensively used on compact coalescing binaries events from the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogs (GWTCs): results have been collected on the GWTC-1, GWTC-2, GWTC-3 and GWTC-4 summaries. The GWTC-4.0 catalog, released in August 2025, is a cumulative catalog of 218 gravitational-wave detections, of which 129 are new O4a events; the cWB GWTC-4 summary covers a subset of 23 O4a events reconstructed with the generic burst configuration of cWB, selected based on network SNR, chirp mass, number of detectors, and availability of NRSUR7DQ4 parameter estimation results.
Quick start
The easiest way to use cWB is to install it through conda-forge: more details can be found in this README file.
Alternatively, the cWB VirtualBox image or the cWB Docker container can be used (though they use older versions of cWB). More information on the Getting Started with GW events page.
Use of cWB
If you use cWB in your scientific publications or projects, we ask that you acknowlege our work by citing the publications that describe cWB and the software’s digital object identifier (DOI), as described in the citation guidelines. Since 2019, cWB code has been released with GPLv3 license.
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