A cloudy bank holiday Monday is a good time to catch up on blogging. Following the splurge of GW150914 papers, I’ve rather fallen behind. Published back in February, this paper is a search for continuous-wave signals: the almost-constant hum produced by rapidly rotating neutron stars.

Continuous-wave searches are extremely computationally expensive. The searches take a while to do, which can lead to a delay before results are published [bonus note]. This is the result of a search using data from LIGO’s sixth science run (March–October 2010).

To detect a continuous wave, you need to sift the data to find a signal that present through all the data. Rotating neutron stars produce a gravitational-wave signal with a frequency twice their orbital frequency. This frequency is almost constant, but could change as the observation goes on because (i) the neutron star slows down as energy is lost (from gravitational waves, magnetic fields or some form of internal sloshing around); (ii) there is some Doppler shifting because of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and, possibly, (iii) the there could be some Doppler shifting because the neutron star is orbiting another object. How do you check for something that is always there?

There are two basic strategies for spotting continuous waves. First, we could look for excess power in a particular frequency bin. If we measure something in addition to what we expect from the detector noise, this could be a signal. Looking at the power is simple, and so not too expensive. However, we’re not using any information about what a real signal should look like, and so it must be really loud for us to be sure that it’s not just noise. Second, we could coherently search for signals using templates for the expected signals. This is much more work, but gives much better sensitivity. Is there a way to compromise between the two strategies to balance cost and sensitivity?

This paper reposts results of a loosely coherent search. Instead of checking how well the data match particular frequencies and frequency evolutions, we average over a family of similar signals. This is less sensitive, as we get a bit more wiggle room in what would be identified as a candidate, but it is also less expensive than checking against a huge number of templates.

We could only detect continuous waves from nearby sources: neutron stars in our own Galaxy. (Perhaps 0.01% of the distance of GW150914). It therefore makes sense to check nearby locations which could be home to neutron stars. This search narrows its range to two directions in the Orion spur, our local band with a high concentration of stars. By focussing in on these spotlight regions, we increase the sensitivity of the search for a given computational cost. This search could possibly dig out signals from twice as far away as if we were considering all possible directions.

The search found 70 interesting candidates. Follow-up study showed that most were due to instrumental effects. There were three interesting candidates left after these checks, none significant enough to be a detection, but still worth looking at in detail. A full coherent analysis was done for these three candidates. This showed that they were probably caused by noise. We have no detections

arXiv: 1510.03474 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review D; 93(4):042006(14); 2016
Science summary: Scouting our Galactic neighborhood
Other bank holiday activities: Scrabble

Bonus note

Niceness

The Continuous Wave teams are polite enough to wait until we’re finished searching for transient gravitational-wave signals (which are more time sensitive) before taking up the LIGO computing clusters. They won’t have any proper results from O1 just yet.