• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.94.082008
• Corpus ID: 118479596

Einstein@Home search for continuous gravitational waves from Cassiopeia A

@article{Zhu2016EinsteinHomeSF,
  title={Einstein@Home search for continuous gravitational waves from Cassiopeia A},
  author={Sylvia Jiechen Zhu and Maria Alessandra Papa and Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein and Reinhard Prix and Karl Wette and Bruce Allen and Oliver Bock and David Keitel and Badri Krishnan and Bernd Machenschalk and Miroslav Shaltev and Xavier Siemens},
  journal={Physical Review D},
  year={2016},
  volume={94},
  pages={082008}
}

• S. Zhu, M. Papa, +9 authors X. Siemens
• Published 26 August 2016
• Physics, Geology
• Physical Review D

We report the results of a directed search for continuous gravitational-wave emission in a broad frequency range (between 50 and 1000 Hz) from the central compact object of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A). The data comes from the sixth science run of LIGO and the search is performed on the volunteer distributed computing network Einstein@Home. We find no significant signal candidate, and set the most constraining upper limits to date on the gravitational-wave emission from Cas A, which beat the indirect age-based upper limit across the entire search range. At around 170 Hz (the most sensitive frequency range), we set 90% confidence upper limits on the gravitational wave amplitude $h_0$ of $\sim\!\!~2.9\times 10^{-25}$, roughly twice as constraining as the upper limits from previous searches on Cas A. The upper limits can also be expressed as constraints on the ellipticity of Cas A; with a few reasonable assumptions, we show that at gravitational-wave frequencies greater than 300~Hz, we can exclude an ellipticity of $\gtrsim\!\!~10^{-5}$.