Einstein@Home all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in LIGO O2 public data

Understand

We conduct an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in the LIGO O2 data from the Hanford and Livingston detectors.

• We search for nearly-monochromatic signals with frequency between 20.0 Hz and 585.15 Hz and spin-down between -2.6e-9 Hz/s and 2.6e-10 Hz/s.
• We deploy the search on the Einstein@Home volunteer-computing project and follow-up the waveforms associated with the most significant results with eight further search-stages, reaching the best sensitivity ever achieved by an all-sky survey up to 500 Hz.
• Six of the inspected waveforms pass all the stages but they are all associated with hardware-injections, which are fake signals simulated at the LIGO detector for validation purposes.