I wonder ...

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Anonymous
30 Sep 2007 19:43:49 UTC
Topic 13599
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    Quote:

    At the pan galactic BOINC meeting (I think this was the official title), the status of the data analysis was given as :

    S3 data: analysis finished, nothing found, see link on the homepage
    S4 data: analysis finished, under internal review
    S5 data: post-processing not finished yet

    So don't hold your breath, as the most sensitive S5 data isn't yet fully processed.


    I can confirm that (apart from the title actually being "3rd Pangalactic BOINC Workshop").

    Some things to add:

    * The sensitivity of the search is not only limited by the sensitivity of the detectors, but also by that of the search (algorithm, parameters). This is one of the reasons why we changed that algorithm for S5R2 (see Reinhard's post).

    * The sensitivity of a search for continuous gravitational waves (from sources we call pulsars) increases with the "observation time", i.e. the amount of data analyzed. So far we are only analyzing roughly the first half of S5 data (S5 officially ended on 1 Oct 2007). We plan to do a search of the full S5 data for S5R4, but there are still some technical problems to overcome.

    * In S5 the LIGO detectors run at their "design sensitivity", i.e. the highest sensitivity achievable with their design. Still we are not sure that there is a source of (continuous) gravitational waves near enough that we can actually detect it with the current instruments. Advanced LIGO is designed to extend the distance by a factor of ten (see "Figure 8" on Reinhard's poster).

    * There are other possible sources of gravitational waves than gravitational pulsars, requiring other methods to search for their signals in the detector data than the one we use on Einstein@home. The clusters of the LSC (including "Nemo") are usually running other searches, and do help Einstein@home only when they would be idle otherwise.

    BM

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