Abstract
The Virgo detector, based at the EGO (European Gravitational Observatory) and located in Cascina (Pisa), played a significant role in the development of the gravitational-wave astronomy. From its first scientific run in 2007, the Virgo detector has constantly been upgraded over the years; since 2017, with the Advanced Virgo project, the detector reached a high sensitivity that allowed the detection of several classes of sources and to investigate new physics. This work reports the main hardware upgrades of the detector and the main astrophysical results from the latest five years; future prospects for the Virgo detector are also presented.
Highlights
Gravitational waves (GWs) are transverse perturbations of the space-time metric produced by non-spherically symmetric accelerating masses
The main sources that can contribute to the stochastic GW background (SGWB) are: Core-Collapse SuperNovae (CCSNe) [43,44,45], neutron stars (NSs), compact objects (CBCs), cosmic strings [46,47,48] and GWs produced during inflation [49,50,51]; among them, the most promising contribution for ground-based GW detectors come from CBCs that might be detectable by Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Advanced Virgo at design sensitivity
Though matched-filter algorithms are optimal just in the case of known signal waveforms embedded in Gaussian stationary noise, they are unparalleled in many cases, such as, e.g., when dealing with the detection of compact binary signals for which the signal energy is spread over a long time interval
Summary
Gravitational waves (GWs) are transverse perturbations of the space-time metric produced by non-spherically symmetric accelerating masses. As predicted by general relativity, a passing gravitational wave will create alternating compression and expansion at orthogonal angles, i.e., producing a measurable strain in the space-time fabric. Some astrophysical phenomena such as a merger of binary neutron stars, a neutron star—black hole merger, or a core-collapse supernova are expected to emit gravitational and electromagnetic waves, and neutrinos: GW detections potentially enable multimessenger studies of these objects. Since 2015, more than 50 gravitational-wave events have been directly detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) [2] and the Virgo [3] detectors, all emitted by binary compact objects and reported in the 1st and the 2nd Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogs, respectively GWTC-1 [4] and GWTC-2 [5]. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a broad outline of the main astrophysical sources of gravitational waves and Section 3 describes the Italian gravitational-wave infrastructures; the main body of the paper is composed of Section 4, reporting a detailed description of the Advanced Virgo interferometer, Section 5, focusing on its performance during the latest observing run and Section 6, reviewing data analysis techniques and main scientific results; we discuss future prospects for the Advanced Virgo project in Section 7 and conclude with Section 8
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