Comprehensive All-sky Search for Periodic Gravitational Waves in the Sixth Science Run LIGO Data

Understand

We report on a comprehensive all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 100-1500 Hz and with a frequency time derivative in the range of $[-1.18, +1.00]\times 10^{-8}$ Hz/s.

• Such a signal could be produced by a nearby spinning and slightly non-axisymmetric isolated neutron star in our galaxy.
• This search uses the data from the Initial LIGO sixth science run and covers a larger parameter space with respect to any past search.
• A Loosely Coherent detection pipeline was applied to follow up weak outliers in both Gaussian (95% recovery rate) and non-Gaussian (75% recovery rate) bands.