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

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 r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2010-01
Main Authors: Llucia Sancho de la Jordana, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Doppler effect
Earth motion
Gravitation
Gravitational waves
Hough transformation
Neutron stars
Pattern recognition
Pulsars
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1001.3754