Hierarchical Hough all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in LIGO S5 data

Abstract

We describe a new pipeline used to analyze the data from the fifth science run (S5) of the LIGO detectors to search for continuous gravitational waves from isolated spinning neutron stars. The method employed is based on the Hough transform, which is a semi-coherent, computationally efficient, and robust pattern recognition technique. The Hough transform is used to find signals in the time-frequency plane of the data whose frequency evolution fits the pattern produced by the Doppler shift imposed on the signal by the Earth's motion and the pulsar's spin-down during the observation period. The main differences with respect to previous Hough all-sky searches are described. These differences include the use of a two-step hierarchical Hough search, analysis of coincidences among the candidates produced in the first and second year of S5, and veto strategies based on a ${\chi }^2$ test.

7 pages, 2 figures, Amaldi08 proceedings, submitted to JPCS

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• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
• Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars
• The Einstein@Home search for periodic gravitational waves in LIGO S4 data
• Einstein@Home search for periodic gravitational waves in early S5 LIGO data
• Detection of periodic gravitational wave sources by Hough transform in the frequency and spin down plane
• Improved Hough search for gravitational wave pulsars
• A ${\chi }^2$ veto for continuous gravitational wave searches

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Searches for Continuous-Wave Gravitational Radiation
• All-sky search in early O3 LIGO data for continuous gravitational-wave signals from unknown neutron stars in binary systems
• Search methods for continuous gravitational-wave signals from unknown sources in the advanced-detector era
• Status and perspectives of Continuous Gravitational Wave searches