Results from an extended Falcon all-sky survey for continuous gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper reports an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in the 200-600 Hz range using LIGO O1 data, demonstrating scalability and setting strict upper limits on potential signals, including those from exotic sources.

Contribution

It extends previous all-sky searches to a larger parameter space and shows improved scalability and sensitivity without relying on irregular noise data.

Findings

Established strict upper limits for gravitational wave signals.

Achieved comparable or better sensitivity than previous results.

Demonstrated scalability of the search method to larger parameter spaces.

Abstract

We present the results of an all-sky search for continuous gravitational wave signals with frequencies in the 200-600 Hz range and frequency derivative (spindown) from -1e-8 through 1.11e-9 Hz/s. Together with the results from [1], this search completes the all-sky survey for frequencies between 20 to 600 Hz on O1 data. It also demonstrates the scalability of our search on a parameter space 26 times larger than previously considered. The results presented here complement the LIGO O2 data results [2,3] with comparable when not better sensitivity and do not rely on data with irregularities in the noise-subtraction procedure. We establish strict upper limits which hold for worst-case signal parameters and dedicated upper limits for generic ~0 spindown signals, such as those expected from boson condensates around black holes.