0000000000039317
AUTHOR
Hsiao-wen Chen
GW170817: Implications for the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background from Compact Binary Coalescences
The LIGO Scientific and Virgo Collaborations have announced the first detection of gravitational waves from the coalescence of two neutron stars. The merger rate of binary neutron stars estimated from this event suggests that distant, unresolvable binary neutron stars create a significant astrophysical stochastic gravitational-wave background. The binary neutron star background will add to the background from binary black holes, increasing the amplitude of the total astrophysical background relative to previous expectations. In the Advanced LIGO-Virgo frequency band most sensitive to stochastic backgrounds (near 25 Hz), we predict a total astrophysical background with amplitude $\Omega_{\rm…
Search for Tensor, Vector, and Scalar Polarizations in the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background
The detection of gravitational waves with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo has enabled novel tests of general relativity, including direct study of the polarization of gravitational waves. While general relativity allows for only two tensor gravitational-wave polarizations, general metric theories can additionally predict two vector and two scalar polarizations. The polarization of gravitational waves is encoded in the spectral shape of the stochastic gravitational-wave background, formed by the superposition of cosmological and individually-unresolved astrophysical sources. Using data recorded by Advanced LIGO during its first observing run, we search for a stochastic background of generic…
All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in the first Advanced LIGO observing run
Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-26T17:45:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2018-03-22 Australian Research Council Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India Department of Science and Technology, India Science AMP; Engineering Research Board (SERB), India Ministry of Human Resource Development, India Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion Vicepresidencia i Conselleria d'Innovacio, Recerca i Turisme Conselleria d'Educacio i Universitat del Govern de les Illes Balears Conselleria d'Educacio, Investigacio, Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana National Science Centre of Poland Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Russian Foundation for Basic Rese…
Tests of General Relativity with GW170817
The recent discovery by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo of a gravitational wave signal from a binary neutron star inspiral has enabled tests of general relativity (GR) with this new type of source. This source, for the first time, permits tests of strong-field dynamics of compact binaries in presence of matter. In this paper, we place constraints on the dipole radiation and possible deviations from GR in the post-Newtonian coefficients that govern the inspiral regime. Bounds on modified dispersion of gravitational waves are obtained; in combination with information from the observed electromagnetic counterpart we can also constrain effects due to large extra dimensions. Finally, the polari…
Mission: Impossible (Escape from the Lyman Limit)
We investigate the intrinsic opacity of high-redshift galaxies to outgoing ionising photons using high-quality photometry of a sample of 27 spectroscopically-identified galaxies of redshift 1.9<z<3.5 in the Hubble Deep Field. Our measurement is based on maximum-likelihood fitting of model galaxy spectral energy distributions-including the effects of intrinsic Lyman-limit absorption and random realizations of intervening Lyman-series and Lyman-limit absorption-to photometry of galaxies from space- and ground-based broad-band images. Our method provides several important advantages over the methods used by previous groups, including most importantly that two-dimensional sky subtraction of fai…
First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data
Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, {\it narrow-band} analyses methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known …
Constraining the p -Mode– g -Mode Tidal Instability with GW170817
We analyze the impact of a proposed tidal instability coupling p modes and g modes within neutron stars on GW170817. This nonresonant instability transfers energy from the orbit of the binary to internal modes of the stars, accelerating the gravitational-wave driven inspiral. We model the impact of this instability on the phasing of the gravitational wave signal using three parameters per star: An overall amplitude, a saturation frequency, and a spectral index. Incorporating these additional parameters, we compute the Bayes factor (lnB!pgpg) comparing our p-g model to a standard one. We find that the observed signal is consistent with waveform models that neglect p-g effects, with lnB!pgpg=…
All-sky search for continuous gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars using Advanced LIGO O2 data
We present results of an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves (CWs), which can be produced by fast-spinning neutron stars with an asymmetry around their rotation axis, using data from the second observing run of the Advanced LIGO detectors. We employ three different semi-coherent methods ($\textit{FrequencyHough}$, $\textit{SkyHough}$, and $\textit{Time-Domain $\mathcal{F}$-statistic}$) to search in a gravitational-wave frequency band from 20 to 1922 Hz and a first frequency derivative from $-1\times10^{-8}$ to $2\times10^{-9}$ Hz/s. None of these searches has found clear evidence for a CW signal, so we present upper limits on the gravitational-wave strain amplitude $h_0$ (the …
All-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in the second Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo run
We present the results of a search for short-duration gravitational-wave transients in the data from the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We search for gravitational-wave transients with a duration of milliseconds to approximately one second in the 32-4096 Hz frequency band with minimal assumptions about the signal properties, thus targeting a wide variety of sources. We also perform a matched-filter search for gravitational-wave transients from cosmic string cusps for which the waveform is well-modeled. The unmodeled search detected gravitational waves from several binary black hole mergers which have been identified by previous analyses. No other significant event…