Optimally setting up directed searches for continuous gravitational waves in Advanced LIGO O1 data

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimized search strategy for continuous gravitational waves from three supernova remnants using Einstein@Home, achieving unprecedented sensitivity and broader frequency coverage compared to previous efforts.

Contribution

It extends a previous framework to design a highly sensitive, broad-coverage search for continuous gravitational waves from specific supernova remnants using volunteer computing.

Findings

Achieved a gravitational wave strain sensitivity twice as small as previous upper limits for Cas A.

Designed a search covering a larger frequency range than prior studies.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of an optimized, resource-aware search framework.

Abstract

In this paper we design a search for continuous gravitational waves from three supernova remnants: Vela Jr., Cassiopeia A (Cas A) and G347.3. These systems might harbor rapidly rotating neutron stars emitting quasi-periodic gravitational radiation detectable by the advanced LIGO detectors. Our search is designed to use the volunteer computing project Einstein@Home for a few months and assumes the sensitivity and duty cycles of the advanced LIGO detectors during their first science run. For all three supernova remnants, the sky-positions of their central compact objects are well known but the frequency and spin-down rates of the neutron stars are unknown which makes the searches computationally limited. In a previous paper we have proposed a general framework for deciding on what target we should spend computational resources and in what proportion, what frequency and spin-down ranges we should search for every target, and with what search set-up. Here we further expand this framework and apply it to design a search directed at detecting continuous gravitational wave signals from the most promising three supernova remnants identified as such in the previous work. Our optimization procedure yields broad frequency and spin-down searches for all three objects, at an unprecedented level of sensitivity: The smallest detectable gravitational wave strain $h_0$ for Cas A is expected to be 2 times smaller than the most sensitive upper-limits published to date, and our proposed search, which was set-up and ran on the volunteer computing project Einstein@Home, covers a much larger frequency range.