January | 2015 | Christopher Berry

Collaboration papers

I’ve been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for just over a year now. It turns out that designing, building and operating a network of gravitational-wave detectors is rather tricky, maybe even harder than completing Super Mario Bros. 3, so it takes a lot of work. There are over 900 collaboration members, all working on different aspects of the project. Since so much of the research is inter-related, certain papers (such as those that use data from the instruments) written by collaboration members have to include the name of everyone who works (at least half the time) on LIGO-related things. After a year in the collaboration, I have now levelled up to be included in the full author list (if there was an initiation ritual, I’ve suppressed the memory). This is weird: papers appear with my name on that I’ve not actually done any work for. It seems sort of like having to bring cake into your office on your birthday: you do have to share your (delicious) cupcakes with everyone else, but in return you get cake even when your birthday is nowhere near. Perhaps all those motivational posters where right about the value of teamwork? I do feel a little guilty about all the extra trees that will die because of people printing out these papers.

My New Year’s resolution was to write a post about every paper I have published. I am going to try to do the LIGO papers too. This should at least make sure that I actually read them all. There are official science summaries written by the people who did actually do the work, which may be better if you actually want an accurate explanation. My first collaboration paper is a joint publication of the LIGO and Virgo collaborations (even more sharing).

Searching for gravitational waves from pulsars

Neutron stars are formed from the cores of dead stars. When a star’s nuclear fuel starts to run out, their core collapses. The most massive form black holes, the lightest (like our Sun) form white dwarfs, and the ones in the middle form neutron stars. These are really dense, they have about the same mass as our entire Sun (perhaps twice the Sun’s mass), but are just a few kilometres across. Pulsars are a type of neutron star, they emit a beam of radiation that sweeps across the sky as they rotate, sort of like a light-house. If one of these beams hits the Earth, we see a radio pulse. The pulses come regularly, so you can work out how fast the pulsar is spinning (and do some other cool things too).

The mandatory cartoon of a pulsar that everyone uses. The top part shows the pulsar and its beams rotating, and the bottom part shows the signal measured on Earth. We not really sure where the beams come from, it’ll be something to do with magnetic fields. Credit: M. Kramer

Because pulsars rotate really quickly, if they have a little bump on their surface, they can emit (potentially detectable) gravitational waves. This paper searches for these signals from the Crab and Vela pulsars. We know where these pulsars are, and how quickly they are rotating, so it’s possible to do a targeted search for gravitational waves (only checking the data for signals that are close to what we expect). Importantly, some wiggle room in the frequency is allowed just in case different parts of the pulsar slosh around at slightly different rates and so the gravitational-wave frequency doesn’t perfectly match what we’d expect from the frequency of pulses; the search is done in a narrow band of frequencies around the expected one. The data used is from Virgo’s fourth science run (VSR4). That was taken back in 2011 (around the time that Captain America was released). The search technique is new (Astone et al., 2014), it’s the first one that incorporates this searching in a narrow band of frequencies; I think the point was to test their search technique on real data before the advanced detectors start producing new data.

Composite image of Hubble (red) optical observations and Chandra (blue) X-ray observations of the Crab pulsar. The pulsar has a mass of 1.4 solar masses and rotates every 30 ms. Credit: Hester et al.

The pulsars emit gravitational waves continuously, they just keep humming as they rotate. The frequency will slow gradually as the pulsar loses energy. As the Earth rotates, the humming gets louder and quieter because the sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors depends upon where the source is in the sky. Putting this all together gives you a good template for what the signal should look like, and you can see how well it fits the data. It’s kind of like trying to find the right jigsaw piece by searching for the one that interlocks best with those around it. Of course, there is a lot of noise in our detectors, so it’s like if the jigsaw was actually made out of jelly: you could get many pieces to fit if you squeeze them the right way, but then people wouldn’t believe that you’ve actually found the right one. Some detection statistics (which I don’t particularly like, but probably give a sensible answer) are used to quantify how likely it is that they’ve found a piece that fits (that there is a signal). The whole pipeline is tested by analysing some injected signals (artificial signals made to see if things work made both by adding signals digitally to the data and by actually jiggling the mirrors of the interferometer). It seems to do OK here.

Turning to the actual data, they very carefully show that they don’t think they’ve detected anything for either Vela or Crab. Of course, all the cool kids don’t detect gravitational waves, so that’s not too surprising.

Zoidberg is an expert on crabs, pulsing or otherwise

This paper doesn’t claim a detection of gravitational waves, but it doesn’t stink like Zoidberg.

Having not detected anything, you can place an upper limit of the amplitude of any waves that are emitted (because if they were larger, you would’ve detected them). This amplitude can then be compared with what’s expected from the spin-down limit: the amplitude that would be required to explain the slowing of the pulsar. We know how the pulsars are slowing, but not why; it could be because of energy being lost to magnetic fields (the energy for the beams has to come from somewhere), it could be through energy lost as gravitational waves, it could be because of some internal damping, it could all be gnomes. The spin-down limit assumes that it’s all because of gravitational waves, you couldn’t have bigger amplitude waves than this unless something else (that would have to be gnomes) was pumping energy into the pulsar to keep it spinning. The upper limit for the Vela pulsar is about the same as the spin-down limit, so we’ve not learnt anything new. For the Crab pulsar, the upper limit is about half the spin-down limit, which is something, but not really exciting. Hopefully, doing the same sort of searches with data from the advanced detectors will be more interesting.

In conclusion, the contents of this paper are well described by its title:

Narrow-band search: It uses a new search technique that is not restricted to the frequency assumed from timing pulses
of continuous gravitational-wave signals: It’s looking for signals from rotating neutron stars (that just keep going) and so are always in the data
from Crab and Vela pulsars: It considers two particular sources, so we know where in parameter space to look for signals
in Virgo VSR4 data: It uses real data, but from the first generation detectors, so it’s not surprising it doesn’t see anything

It’s probably less fun that eating a jigsaw-shaped jelly, but it might be more useful in the future.

arXiv: 1410.8310 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review D; 91(2):022004(15); 2015
Science summary: An Extended Search for Gravitational Waves from the Crab and Vela Pulsars
Percentage of paper that is author list: ~30%

Differing weights and differing measures—
the LORD detests them both. — Proverbs 20:10

As a New Year’s resolution, I thought I would try to write a post on each paper I have published. (I might try to go back and talk about my old papers too, but that might be a little too optimistic.) Handily, I have a paper that was published in Classical & Quantum Gravity on Thursday, so let’s get on with it, and hopefully 2015 will deliver those hoverboards soon.

This paper was written in collaboration with my old officemates, Chris Moore and Rob Cole, and originates from my time in Cambridge. We were having a weekly group meeting (surreptitiously eating cake—you’re not meant to eat in the new meeting rooms) and discussing what to do for the upcoming open afternoon. Posters are good as you can use them to decorate your office afterwards, so we decided on making one on gravitational-wave astronomy. Gravitational waves come in a range of frequencies, just like light (electromagnetic radiation). You can observe different systems with different frequencies, but you need different instruments to do so. For light, the range is from high frequency gamma rays (observed with satellites like Fermi) to low frequency radio waves (observed with telescopes like those at Jodrell Bank or Arecibo), with visible light (observed with Hubble or your own eyes) in the middle. Gravitational waves also have a spectrum, ground-based detectors like LIGO measure the higher frequencies, pulsar timing arrays measure the lower frequencies, and space-borne detectors like eLISA measure stuff in the middle. We wanted a picture that showed the range of each instrument and the sources they could detect, but we couldn’t find a good up-to-date one. Chris is not one to be put off by a challenge (especially if it’s a source of procrastination), so he decided to have a go at making one himself. How hard could it be? We never made that poster, but we did end up with a paper.

When talking about gravitational-wave detectors, you normally use a sensitivity curve. This shows how sensitive it is at a given frequency: you plot a graph with the sensitivity curve on, and then plot the spectrum of the source you’re interested in on the same graph. If your source is above the sensitivity curve, you can detect it (yay), but if it lies below it, then you can’t pick it out from the noise (boo). Making a plot with lots of sensitivity curves on sounds simple: you look up the details for lots of detectors, draw them together and add a few sources. However, there are lots of different conventions for how you actually measure sensitivity, and they’re frequently muddled up! We were rather confused by the whole thing, but eventually (after the open afternoon had flown by), we figured things out and made our picture. So we wouldn’t forget, we wrote up the different conventions, why you might want to use each, and how to convert between them; these notes became the paper. We also thought it would be handy to have a website where you could make your own plot, picking which detectors and sources you wanted to include. Rob also likes a challenge (especially if it’s a source of procrastination), so he set about making such a thing. I think it turned out rather well!

That’s the story of the paper. It explains different conventions for characterising gravitational-wave detectors and sources, and gives some examples. If you’d actually like to know some of the details, I’ll give a little explanation now, if not, just have a look at the pretty plots below (or, if looking for your own source of procrastination, have a go at Space Time Quest, a game where you try to build the most sensitive detector).

There are three common conventions in use for sensitivity-curve plots: the characteristic strain, the amplitude spectral density and the energy density.

You might wonder why we don’t just directly use the amplitude of the wave? Gravitational waves are a stretching and squashing of spacetime, so you can characterise how much they stretch and squeeze things and use that to describe the size of your waves. The sensitivity of your detector is then how much various sources of noise cause a similar wibbling. The amplitude of the wave is really, really small, so it’s difficult to detect, but if you were to consider observations over a time interval instead of just one moment, it’s easier to spot a signal: hints that there might be a signal add up until you’re certain that it’s there. The characteristic strain is a way of modifying the amplitude to take into account how we add up the signal. It’s especially handy, as if you make a log–log plot (such that the space between 1 and 10 is the same as between 10 and 100, etc.), then the area between the characteristic strain of your source and the detector sensitivity curve gives you a measure of the signal-to-noise ratio, a measure of how loud (how detectable) a signal is.

Gravitational-wave sensitivity-curve plot using characteristic strain. The area between the detector’s curve and the top of the box for a source indicates how loud that signal would be.

The characteristic strain is handy for quickly working out how loud a signal is, but it’s not directly related to anything we measure. The noise in a detector is usually described by its power spectral density or PSD. This tells you how much wibbling there is on average. Actually, it tells you the average amount of wibbling squared. The square root of the PSD is the amplitude spectral density or ASD. This gives a handy indication of the sensitivity of your detector, which is actually related to what you measure.

Gravitational-wave sensitivity-curve plot using the square root of the power spectral density (the amplitude spectral density).

The PSD is tied to the detector, but isn’t too relevant to the actual waves. An interesting property of the waves is how much energy they carry. We talk about this in terms of the energy density, the energy per unit volume. Cosmologists love this, and to make things easy for themselves, they like to divide energy densities by the amount that would make the Universe flat. (If you’ve ever wondered what astrophysicists mean when they say the Universe is about 70% dark energy and about 25% dark matter, they’re using these quantities). To make things even simpler, they like to multiply this quantity by something related to the Hubble constant (which measures the expansion rate of the Universe), as this means things don’t change if you tweak the numbers describing how the Universe evolves. What you’re left with is a quantity $\Omega h_{100}^2$ that is really convenient if you’re a cosmologist, but a pain for anyone else. It does have the advantage of making the pulsar timing arrays look more sensitive though.

Gravitational-wave sensitivity-curve plot using the energy density that cosmologists love. The proper name of the plotted quantity is the critical energy density per logarithmic frequency interval multiplied by the reduced Hubble constant squared. I prefer Bob.

We hope that the paper will be useful for people (like us), who can never remember what the conventions are (and why). There’s nothing new (in terms of results) in this paper, but I think it’s the first time all this material has been collected together in one place. If you ever need to make a poster about gravitational waves, I know where you can find a good picture.

arXiv: 1408.0740 [gr-qc]
Journal: Classical & Qunatum Gravity; 32(1):015014(25); 2015
Website: Gravitational Wave Sensitivity Curve Plotter
Procrastination score: TBC