Results of the deepest all-sky survey for continuous gravitational waves on LIGO S6 data running on the Einstein@Home volunteer distributed computing project

TL;DR

This paper reports on a comprehensive all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars using LIGO S6 data, leveraging volunteer computing, setting new upper limits on wave amplitudes and neutron star ellipticities.

Contribution

It presents the most sensitive upper limits to date on gravitational wave signals from isolated neutron stars, utilizing the Einstein@Home distributed computing project.

Findings

No significant gravitational wave signals detected.

Set the most stringent upper limits on wave amplitude to date.

Constrained neutron star ellipticities within 100 parsecs at 230 Hz.

Abstract

We report results of a deep all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars in data from the S6 LIGO science run. The search was possible thanks to the computing power provided by the volunteers of the Einstein@Home distributed computing project. We find no significant signal candidate and set the most stringent upper limits to date on the amplitude of gravitational wave signals from the target population. At the frequency of best strain sensitivity, between $170.5$ and $171$ Hz we set a 90% confidence upper limit of ${5.5}^{-25}$, while at the high end of our frequency range, around 505 Hz, we achieve upper limits $\simeq {10}^{-24}$. At $230$ Hz we can exclude sources with ellipticities greater than $10^{-6}$ within 100 pc of Earth with fiducial value of the principal moment of inertia of $10^{38} \textrm{kg m}^2$. If we assume a higher (lower) gravitational wave spindown we constrain farther (closer) objects to higher (lower) ellipticities.