Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars

Creators: Abbott, B.; Drever, R. W. P.; Brown, D. A.; Savov, P.; Siemens, X.; Thorne, K. S.; Vallisneri, M.; Abbott, R.; Adhikari, Rana X.; Agresti, J.; Anderson, S. B.; Araya, M.; Armandula, H.; Ballmer, S.; Barish, B. C.; Bhawal, B.; Billingsley, G.; Black, E.; Blackburn, K.; Bork, R.; Boschi, V.; Busby, D.; Cardenas, L.; Cepeda, C.; Chatterji, S.; Coyne, D.; Creighton, T. D.; D'Ambrosio, E.; DeSalvo, R.; Dupuis, R. J.; Ehrens, P.; Espinoza, E.; Etzel, T.; Evans, M.; Fairhurst, S.; Fazi, D.; Goggin, L.; Heefner, J.; Ivanov, A.; Kells, W.; Keppel, D. G.; King, P.; Kondrashov, V.; Kozak, D.; Lazzarini, A.; Lei, M.; Libbrecht, K.; Lindquist, P.; Mageswaran, M.; Mailand, K.; Mandic, V.; Maros, E.; Marx, J. N.; Meshkov, S.; Messaritaki, E.; Meyers, D.; Miyakawa, O.; Nash, T.; Nocera, F.; Patel, P.; Pedraza, M.; Robertson, N. A.; Russell, P.; Samidi, M.; Sanders, G. H.; Sannibale, V.; Sears, B.; Smith, M. R.; Sutton, P. J.; Tarallo, M.; Taylor, R.; Tyler, W.; Varvella, M.; Vass, S.; Villar, A.; Waldman, S. J.; Wallace, L.; Ward, R.; Webber, D.; Weinstein, A. J.; Whitcomb, S. E.; Willems, P. A.; Yamamoto, H.; Zhang, L.; Zweizig, J.; LIGO Scientific Collaboration

Abstract

We present upper limits on the gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars based on data from the third and fourth science runs of the LIGO and GEO 600 gravitational wave detectors. The data from both runs have been combined coherently to maximize sensitivity. For the first time, pulsars within binary (or multiple) systems have been included in the search by taking into account the signal modulation due to their orbits. Our upper limits are therefore the first measured for 56 of these pulsars. For the remaining 22, our results improve on previous upper limits by up to a factor of 10. For example, our tightest upper limit on the gravitational strain is 2.6×10^(−25) for PSR J1603−7202, and the equatorial ellipticity of PSR J2124–3358 is less than 10^(−6). Furthermore, our strain upper limit for the Crab pulsar is only 2.2 times greater than the fiducial spin-down limit.

Additional Information

© 2007 The American Physical Society. Received 4 April 2007; revised 20 June 2007; published 3 August 2007; publisher error corrected 29 February 2008. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory, and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society, and the State of Niedersachsen/ Germany for support of the construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the research by these agencies and by the Australian Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Department of Science and Technology of India, the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Research Corporation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Published - PhysRevD.76.042001.pdf

Submitted - 0702039v5.pdf

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