All-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the full S5 LIGO data

Authors

J. Abadie
B. P. Abbott
Matthew Benacquista, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Teviet Creighton, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Mario C. Diaz, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Soumya Mohanty, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Soma Mukherjee, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Malik Rakhmanov, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Volker Quetschke, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Joseph D. Romano, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-5-2012

Abstract

We report on an all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 50-800Hz and with the frequency time derivative in the range of 0 through -6×10-9Hz/s. Such a signal could be produced by a nearby spinning and slightly nonaxisymmetric isolated neutron star in our Galaxy. After recent improvements in the search program that yielded a 10× increase in computational efficiency, we have searched in two years of data collected during LIGO's fifth science run and have obtained the most sensitive all-sky upper limits on gravitational-wave strain to date. Near 150Hz our upper limit on worst-case linearly polarized strain amplitude h0 is 1×10-24, while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 3.8×10-24 for all polarizations and sky locations. These results constitute a factor of 2 improvement upon previously published data. A new detection pipeline utilizing a loosely coherent algorithm was able to follow up weaker outliers, increasing the volume of space where signals can be detected by a factor of 10, but has not revealed any gravitational-wave signals. The pipeline has been tested for robustness with respect to deviations from the model of an isolated neutron star, such as caused by a low-mass or long-period binary companion. © 2012 American Physical Society.

Comments

© Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology. Original version available at: http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.85.022001

Recommended Citation

Abadie, J., B. P. Abbott, Robert Abbott, T. D. Abbott, M. Abernathy, T. Accadia, Fausto Acernese et al. "All-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the full S5 LIGO data." Physical Review D—Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology 85, no. 2 (2012): 022001. http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.85.022001

Publication Title

Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevD.85.022001