Comprehensive All-Sky Search for Periodic Gravitational Waves In the Sixth Science Run LIGO Data

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-15-2016

Journal / Book Title

Physical Review D

Abstract

We report on a comprehensive all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 100-1500 Hz and with a frequency time derivative in the range of [-1.18,+1.00]×10-8 Hz/s. Such a signal could be produced by a nearby spinning and slightly nonaxisymmetric isolated neutron star in our galaxy. This search uses the data from the initial LIGO sixth science run and covers a larger parameter space with respect to any past search. A Loosely Coherent detection pipeline was applied to follow up weak outliers in both Gaussian (95% recovery rate) and non-Gaussian (75% recovery rate) bands. No gravitational wave signals were observed, and upper limits were placed on their strength. Our smallest upper limit on worst-case (linearly polarized) strain amplitude h0 is 9.7×10-25 near 169 Hz, while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 5.5×10-24. Both cases refer to all sky locations and entire range of frequency derivative values.

Comments

This work is part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. Additional authors may be found on the publication.

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevD.94.042002

Published Citation

Abbott, B. P., Abbott, R., Abbott, T. D., Abernathy, M. R., Acernese, F., Ackley, K., ... & Chao, S. (2016). Comprehensive all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the sixth science run LIGO data. Physical Review D, 94(4), 042002.

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