Search

The fourth science run of the LIGO and GEO 600 gravitational-wave detectors, carried out in early 2005, collected data with significantly lower noise than previous science runs. We report on a search for short-duration gravitational-wave bursts with arbitrary waveform in the 64-1600 Hz frequency range appearing in all three LIGO interferometers. Signal consistency tests, data quality cuts and auxiliary-channel vetoes are applied to reduce the rate of spurious triggers. No gravitational-wave signals are detected in 15.5 days of live observation time; we set a frequentist upper limit of 0.15 day[?]1 (at 90% confidence level) on the rate of bursts with large enough amplitudes to be detected reliably. The amplitude sensitivity of the search, characterized using Monte Carlo simulations, is several times better than that of previous searches. We also provide rough estimates of the distances at which representative supernova and binary black hole merger signals could be detected with 50% efficiency by this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is to detect and study gravitational waves (GWs) of astrophysical origin. Direct detection of GWs holds the promise of testing general relativity in the strong-field regime, of providing a new probe of exotic objects such as black holes and neutron stars and of uncovering unanticipated new astrophysics. LIGO, a joint Caltech-MIT project supported by the National Science Foundation, operates three multi-kilometer interferometers at two widely separated sites in the United States. These detectors are the result of decades of worldwide technology development, design, construction and commissioning. They are now operating at their design sensitivity, and are sensitive to gravitational wave strains smaller than one part in 1021. With this unprecedented sensitivity, the data are being analyzed to detect or place limits on GWs from a variety of potential astrophysical sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of the first joint search for gravitational-wave bursts by the LIGO and GEO 600 detectors. We search for bursts with characteristic central frequencies in the band 768-2048 Hz in the data acquired between 22 February and 23 March, 2005 (fourth LSC Science Run-S4). We discuss the inclusion of the GEO 600 data in the Waveburst-CorrPower pipeline that first searches for coincident excess power events without taking into account differences in the antenna responses or strain sensitivities of the various detectors. We compare the performance of this pipeline to that of the coherent Waveburst pipeline based on the maximum likelihood statistic. This likelihood statistic is derived from a coherent sum of the detector data streams that takes into account the antenna patterns and sensitivities of the different detectors in the network. We find that the coherent Waveburst pipeline is sensitive to signals of amplitude 30-50% smaller than the Waveburst-CorrPower pipeline. We perform a search for gravitational-wave bursts using both pipelines and find no detection candidates in the S4 data set when all four instruments were operating stably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In gravitational-wave detection, special emphasis is put onto searches that focus on cosmic events detected by other types of astrophysical observatories. The astrophysical triggers, e.g. from g-ray and x-ray satellites, optical telescopes and neutrino observatories, provide a trigger time for analyzing gravitational-wave data coincident with the event. In certain cases the expected frequency range, source energetics, directional and progenitor information are also available. Beyond allowing the recognition of gravitational waveforms with amplitudes closer to the noise floor of the detector, these triggered searches should also lead to rich science results even before the onset of Advanced LIGO. In this paper we provide a broad review of LIGO's astrophysically triggered searches and the sources they target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]