Comprehensive All-sky Search for Periodic Gravitational Waves in the Sixth Science Run LIGO Data

Document #:

LIGO-P1500219-v20

Document type:

P - Publications

Abstract:

We report on a comprehensive all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 100-1500 Hz and with the frequency time derivative in the range of 1e-8 through -1.18e-8 Hz/s. Such a signal could be produced by a nearby spinning and slightly non-axisymmetric isolated neutron star in our galaxy. The spindown and frequency ranges were chosen to cover a large parameter space before the Advanced LIGO interferometers come into operation. New algorithms allowed the search to provide comprehensive coverage for both Gaussian and non-Gaussian frequency bands. Near 169 Hz our upper limit on worst-case linearly polarized strain amplitude h0 is 9.7e-25, while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 5.5e-24 for all polarizations and sky locations.
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.

Files in Document:

• Paper PDF (S6PowerFlux_AllSky.pdf, 799.5 kB)

Topics:

• Continuous Wave
• Data analysis software

Author Groups:

• LVC

Keywords:

PowerFlux loosely coherent all-sky CW

Journal References:

Published in Phys Rev D vol. 94 pg. 042002.