Using a cleaning technique for the search of continuous gravitational waves in LIGO data

High frequency short events, due for instance to delta-like spurious disturbances, may affect the broad band noise level and thus produce a loss in the efficiency of detection of continuous gravitational waves. We identify such events, remove them from a set of LIGO fifth science run (S5) data and characterize the resulting sensitivity improvements. We use the same parameter values as used in a previous pilot study on Virgo data, but do not observe on LIGO S5 data the same sensitivity improvements.