Einstein@Home search for periodic gravitational waves in LIGO S4 data

2008/04/10 by LIGO Scientific Collaboration, R. Abbott, B. Abbott +98 · 133 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Frequency and Time Standards #Amplitude #Astrophysics #Computational physics #Dimensionless quantity #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Gravitational wave #LIGO #Optics #Parameter space #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Statistics #gr-qc

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.79.022001

published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 79(2) (American Physical Society) · 29 pages, 19 figures

arxiv created 2008/04/10 · openalex publication_date 2009/01/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

A search for periodic gravitational waves, from sources such as isolated rapidly spinning neutron stars, was carried out using 510 h of data from the fourth LIGO science run (S4). The search was for quasimonochromatic waves in the frequency range from 50 to 1500 Hz, with a linear frequency drift \stackrel\ifmmode \else \textperiodcentered \fif (measured at the solar system barycenter) in the range \ensuremath-f/\ensuremathτ<\stackrel\ifmmode \else \textperiodcentered \fif<0.1f/\ensuremathτ, where the minimum spin-down age \ensuremathτ was 1000 yr for signals below 300 Hz and 10 000 yr above 300 Hz. The main computational work of the search was distributed over approximately 100 000 computers volunteered by the general public. This large computing power allowed the use of a relatively long coherent integration time of 30 h, despite the large parameter space searched. No statistically significant signals were found. The sensitivity of the search is estimated, along with the fraction of parameter space that was vetoed because of contamination by instrumental artifacts. In the 100 to 200 Hz band, more than 90% of sources with dimensionless gravitational-wave strain amplitude greater than 10^\ensuremath-23 would have been detected.

Citations

• Making h ( t ) for LIGO
• Searching for periodic sources with LIGO. II. Hierarchical searches
• A new principle for fast Fourier transformation
• Relativity in the Global Positioning System
• Parameter-space correlations of the optimal statistic for continuous gravitational-wave detection
• Gravitational waves from neutron stars with large toroidalBfields
• Search for gravitational waves associated with 39 gamma-ray bursts using data from the second, third, and fourth LIGO runs
• An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series

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