Search

Core-collapse supernovae are factories of neutron stars and stellar mass black holes. Type Ib/c supernovae stand out as potentially originating in relatively compact stellar binaries and their branching ratio of about 1\% into long gamma-ray bursts. The most energetic events probably derive from central engines harboring rapidly rotating black holes, wherein accretion of fall-back matter down to the Inner Most Stable Circular Orbit (ISCO) offers a window to {\em broadband extended gravitational-wave emission} (BEGE). To search for BEGE, we introduce a butterfly filter in time-frequency space by Time Sliced Matched Filtering. To analyze long epochs of data, we propose using coarse grained searches followed by high resolution searches on events of interest. We illustrate our proposed coarse grained search on two weeks of LIGO S6 data prior to SN 2010br $(z=0.002339)$ using a bank of up to 64 thousand templates of one second duration covering a broad range in chirp frequencies and bandwidth. Correlating events with signal-to-noise ratios $>6$ from the LIGO L1 and H1 detectors each reduces to a few events of interest. Lacking any further properties reflecting a common excitation by broadband gravitational radiation, we disregarded these as spurious. This new pipeline may be used to systematically search for long duration chirps in nearby core-collapse supernovae from robotic optical transient surveys using embarrassingly parallel computing., 26 pages, 8 figures, to appear in ApJ

Numerical relativity describes a discrete initial value problem for general relativity. A choice of gauge involves slicing space-time into space-like hypersurfaces. This introduces past and future gauge relative to the hypersurface of present time. Here, we propose solving the discretized Einstein equations with a choice of gauge in the future and a dynamical gauge in the past. The method is illustrated on a polarized Gowdy wave., To appear in Class Quantum Grav, Lett

Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) could be emitted from rapidly spinning black-hole-torus systems, resulting from either hypernovae or black-hole-neutron-star coalescence. We show that a nonaxisymmetric torus may also radiate gravitational radiation, powered by the spin energy of the black hole. The coupling to the spin energy of the black hole operates by equivalence in poloidal topology to pulsar magnetospheres. Results calculated in the suspended-accretion state indicate that GRBs are potentially the most powerful LIGO/VIRGO burst sources in the Universe, with an expected duration of 10-15 s on a horizontal branch of 1-2 kHz in the f(f) diagram.

The collapse of young massive stars or the coalescence of a black hole-neutron star binary is expected to give rise to a black hole-torus system. When the torus is strongly magnetized, the black hole produces electron-positron outflow along open magnetic field-lines. Through curvature radiation in gaps, this outflow rapidly develops into a $e^\pm\gamma$-wind, which is ultra-relativistic and of low comoving density, proposed here as a possible input to GRB fireball models., Comment: Revised and extended, 1 figure; to appear in: `Proc of Explosive Phenom in Astroph Compact Objects', Seoul, Korea

A numerical simulation of a fully relativistic jet in slab geometry is presented. The simulation uses a covariant divergence formulation of the equations of hydrodynamics. A Mach disk familiar from nonrelativistic simulations is observed. We also find relativistically narrow streaks in the pressure distribution near the aperture.