Abstract
We report results of a deep all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars in data from the S6 LIGO science run. The search was possible thanks to the computing power provided by the volunteers of the Einstein@Home distributed computing project. We find no significant signal candidate and set the most stringent upper limits to date on the amplitude of gravitational wave signals from the target population. At the frequency of best strain sensitivity, between 170.5 and 171 Hz we set a 90% confidence upper limit of 5.5×10−25, while at the high end of our frequency range, around 505 Hz, we achieve upper limits ≃10−24. At 230 Hz we can exclude sources with ellipticities greater than 10−6 within 100 pc of Earth with fiducial value of the principal moment of inertia of 1038 kg m2. If we assume a higher (lower) gravitational wave spin-down we constrain farther (closer) objects to higher (lower) ellipticities. Published by the American Physical Society 2016
Highlights
In this paper we report the results of a deep all-sky Einstein@Home [1] search for continuous, nearly monochromatic gravitational waves (GWs) in data from LIGO’s sixth science (S6) run
The search described in this paper targets nearly monochromatic gravitational wave signals as described for example by Eqs. 1–4 of [7]
We set frequentist upper limits on the maximum gravitational wave amplitude consistent with this null result in half-Hz bands: h900%(f). h900%(f) is the GW amplitude such that 90% of a population of signals with parameter values in our search range would have produced a candidate louder than what was observed by our search
Summary
In this paper we report the results of a deep all-sky Einstein@Home [1] search for continuous, nearly monochromatic gravitational waves (GWs) in data from LIGO’s sixth science (S6) run. A number of all-sky searches have been carried out on LIGO data, [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11], of which [5,7,10] ran on Einstein@Home. The search presented here covers frequencies from 50 Hz through 510 Hz and frequency derivatives from 3.39 × 10−10 Hz=s through −2.67 × 10−9 Hz=s. In this range we establish the most constraining gravitational wave amplitude upper limits to date for the target signal population
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