Broad Parameter Range Searches for Continuous Gravitational Waves

Continuous gravitational waves are nearly monochromatic, long-lasting signals that are expected to be produced by rapidly rotating non-axisymmetric neutron stars and may also come from exotic sources such as the inspiral of dark-matter objects or superradiant emission of axion-like particles around black holes.

Despite numerous detections of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences, continuous gravitational waves have yet to be detected. One approach to search for these signals is through broad parameter range searches, where the waveform parameters of the signal and the source location are unknown. These types of searches are among the most computationally intensive, often requiring months of processing on large supercomputer clusters.

We present ongoing efforts to conduct broad parameter range searches for continuous gravitational waves in LIGO public data, highlight the most constraining upper limits on the detectable intrinsic continuous gravitational wave amplitude and discuss the prospects of a detection.

A successful detection of continuous gravitational wave could reveal the extreme physical properties of neutron star matter and improve our understanding of the galactic population of electromagnetically invisible compact objects.