Astrophysically Triggered Searches for Gravitational Waves: Status and Prospects

TL;DR

This paper reviews the status and potential of astrophysically triggered gravitational wave searches, which utilize signals from other observatories to enhance detection prospects and scientific insights.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of LIGO's triggered search strategies and the astrophysical sources they aim to detect, highlighting future prospects.

Findings

Triggered searches improve detection sensitivity.

Multi-messenger observations enable richer science.

Current status of LIGO's triggered search efforts.

Abstract

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 gamma-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 is 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.