English

Einstein@Home all-sky "bucket" search for continuous gravitational waves in LIGO O3 public data

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-09-01 v2

Abstract

We conduct an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves using LIGO O3 public data from the Hanford and Livingston detectors. We search for nearly-monochromatic signals with frequencies 30Hzf250Hz30\, \text{Hz} \leq f \leq 250\, \text{Hz} and spin-down 2.7×109Hz/sf˙0.2×109Hz/s-2.7 \times 10^{-9}\, \text{Hz/s} \leq \dot{f} \leq 0.2 \times 10^{-9}\, \text{Hz/s}. We deploy this search on the Einstein@Home volunteer-computing project and on three super computer clusters; the Atlas supercomputer at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, and the two high performance computing systems Raven and Viper at the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility. Our results are consistent with a non-detection. We set upper limits on the gravitational wave amplitude h0h_{0}, and translate these to upper limits on the neutron star ellipticity and on the r-mode amplitude. The most stringent upper limits are at 173 Hz with h0=6.5×1026h_{0} = 6.5\times 10^{-26}, at the 90% confidence level.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.16423,
  title  = {Einstein@Home all-sky "bucket" search for continuous gravitational waves in LIGO O3 public data},
  author = {Brian McGloughlin and Jasper Martins and Benjamin Steltner and Maria Alessandra Papa and Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein and Bernd Machenschalk and Reinhard Prix and Maximillian Bensch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.16423},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures - Updated references - Correction of axis-labels in Fig. 3 and Fig. 5 - Added corresponding authors - Fixed typos