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15. Progress since the S3-analysis, and plans for the future

In late June 2005 we started another Einstein@Home run with a similar setup, but using (the more sensitive) data from the S4 LIGO science run. A significant difference is that this S4 analysis used data from both the LIGO Hanford (H1) and the LIGO Livingston (L1) instruments. This first search on S4 data was finished in December 2005, and was used in part to veto some of the S3-candidates by followup, as mentioned in section 14.

On December 24, 2005, we launched an improved Einstein@Home search (application albert) on S4 data, with a number of modifications:

This improved S4 search finished in June 2006, and the postprocessing of the results is still underway, though largely complete. The results will be announced in another set of web pages similar to these.

As the improved S4 search ended in June 2006, a new search with the same setup was launched on 840 hours of data from the first two months of S5, analyzed in segments of 30 hours (application einstein_S5R1). After five years of continuing commissioning and improvements, LIGO has reached its design sensitivity ('SRD') in the S5 science run (see Sec. 8), which will take data for about one and a half years. Einstein@Home will continue to run improved searches on these S5 data as they become available. Note that with these improved E@H-searches on S4 and S5 data, the problem of the "noisy belt" described in Sec. 12 is expected to be somewhat reduced, both because of the longer coherent integration time (T=30 hours instead of T=10 hours) and the improved noise level of the detector.

After another planned long science run (S6), the LIGO Lab, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and international partners will start to install an Advanced LIGO upgrade [43], which will improve the strain sensitivity by a factor of 10. Since the volume of space that the instrument can see grows as the cube of the distance, this means that the number of sources that can be detected will be up to 1,000 times greater than for initial LIGO. New detector hardware will be installed in the existing LIGO vacuum systems at the LIGO Hanford and Livingston Observatories and will replace the present instruments. Advanced LIGO will transform gravitational wave science into a real observational tool. It is anticipated that these new instruments may discover new gravitational-wave sources as often as once per day, with excellent signal strength, allowing details of the waveforms to be read off and compared with theories of neutron stars, black holes, and other highly relativistic objects.


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Einstein@Home S3 Analysis Summary
Last Revised: 2007.03.28 08:59:23 UTC
Copyright © 2005 Bruce Allen for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
Document version: 1.132