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

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2012

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Ganija, M.
Hosken, D.
Munch, J.
Ottaway, D.
Veitch, P.

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Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, 2012; 85(2):022001-1-022001-19

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J. Abadie... M. R. Ganija …D. J. Hosken... J. Munch... D. J. Ottaway... P. J. Veitch... et al., (LIGO Scientific Collaboration), (Virgo Collaboration)

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Abstract

We report on an all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 50–800 Hz and with the frequency time derivative in the range of 0 through -6×10-9  Hz/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 150 Hz 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.

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© 2012 American Physical Society

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