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Coherent WaveBurst (cWB) is a data-analysis pipeline designed to detect and reconstruct gravitational-wave (GW) transients — short-duration signals produced by astronomical events — across the worldwide network of GW detectors, the instruments that measure the tiny distortions of spacetime caused by passing GWs. Using wavelets (mathematical functions that decompose data into components at different scales), cWB explores the time-frequency structure of the data and identifies generic GW signals with minimal or no assumptions about the source model. cWB exists in several flavors; see the Other cWB flavors page for an overview of pycWB and cWB-XP. All results and software presented on this website refer to the standard cWB pipeline, also known as cWB 2G.
cWB has been in active development since 2003 and has been used to analyze all scientific data collected by the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) collaboration. On September 14, 2015, the cWB low-latency search — a rapid, automated scan that runs on incoming detector data — identified the first GW event, GW150914, the merger of two black holes (LVC link). cWB later played a major role in the discovery of the first intermediate-mass black hole, GW190521 (LVC link), and contributed to the measurement of higher-order inspiral modes — additional waveform components produced by mass asymmetry or spin in the binary — on GW190814 (LVC link). cWB has also been extensively applied to compact coalescing binary events (mergers involving neutron stars and/or black holes) from the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogs (GWTCs), the LVK series of cumulative event releases (each release includes all previously published events plus those from a new observing-run segment). Each cWB summary page, by contrast, covers only the events new to its release: GWTC-1 for O1+O2, GWTC-2 for O3a, GWTC-3 for O3b, and GWTC-4 for O4a. Released in August 2025, the GWTC-4.0 catalog is a cumulative collection of 218 GW detections, including 129 new O4a events; the cWB GWTC-4 summary covers a subset of 23 O4a events reconstructed with the generic burst configuration of cWB and selected based on network signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), chirp mass (a combination of the binary’s two masses that determines how the GW frequency evolves during inspiral), number of detectors, and availability of NRSur7dq4 parameter-estimation results (a specific waveform model).
Quick start
The recommended way to install cWB is via conda-forge — see the README for full instructions. The cWB Docker container is a good alternative. As fallbacks, a full source installation (Linux only) and the cWB VirtualBox image (legacy — ships an older version of cWB) remain available. See the Getting Started with GW events page for details.
Use of cWB
If you use cWB in your scientific publications or projects, we ask that you acknowledge our work by citing the publications describing cWB together with the software’s digital object identifier (DOI), as explained in the citation guidelines. cWB has been released under the GPLv3 license since 2019.
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