An apparatus to search for optical flashes in the sky is described. It has been optimized for gamma ray bursts (GRB) optical counterparts. It consists of 2x16 cameras covering all the sky. The sky is monitored continuously and the data are analysed on-line. It has self-triggering capability and can react to external triggers with negative delay. The prototype with two cameras has been installed at Las Campanas (Chile) and is operational from July 2004. The paper presents general idea and describes the apparatus in detail. Performance of the prototype is briefly reviewed and perspectives for the future are outlined.
We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10 - 500 s in a frequency band of 40 - 1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between $3.4 times 10^{-5}$ - $9.4 times 10^{-4}$ Mpc$^{-3}$ yr$^{-1}$ at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves.
A search for periodic gravitational-wave signals from isolated neutron stars in the NAUTILUS detector data is presented. We have analyzed half a year of data over the frequency band $<922.2; 923.2>$ Hz, the spindown range $<-1.463times10^{-8}; 0>$ Hz/s and over the entire sky. We have divided the data into 2 day stretches and we have analyzed each stretch coherently using matched filtering. We have imposed a low threshold for the optimal detection statistic to obtain a set of candidates that are further examined for coincidences among various data stretches. For some candidates we have also investigated the change of the signal-to-noise ratio when we increase the observation time from two to four days. Our analysis has not revealed any gravitational-wave signals. Therefore we have imposed upper limits on the dimensionless gravitational-wave amplitude over the parameter space that we have searched. Depending on frequency, our upper limit ranges from $3.4 times 10^{-23}$ to $1.3 times 10^{-22}$. We have attempted a statistical verification of the hypotheses leading to our conclusions. We estimate that our upper limit is accurate to within 18%.
The future of radio astronomy will require instruments with large collecting areas for higher sensitivity, wide fields of view for faster survey speeds, and efficient computing and data rates relative to current capabilities. We describe the first successful deployment of the E-field Parallel Imaging Correlator (EPIC) on the LWA station in Sevilleta, New Mexico, USA (LWA-SV). EPIC is a solution to the computational problem of large interferometers. By gridding and spatially Fourier transforming channelised electric fields from the antennas in real-time, EPIC removes the explicit cross multiplication of all pairs of antenna voltages to synthesize an aperture, reducing the computational scaling from $mathcal{O}(n_a^2)$ to $mathcal{O}(n_g log_2 n_g)$, where $n_a$ is the number of antennas and $n_g$ is the number of grid points. Not only does this save computational costs for dense arrays but it produces very high time resolution images in real time. The GPU-based implementation uses existing LWA-SV hardware and the high performance streaming framework, Bifrost. We examine the practical details of the EPIC deployment and verify the imaging performance by detecting a meteor impact on the atmosphere using continuous all-sky imaging at 50 ms time resolution.
We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational-wave transients in the data from the Advanced LIGO second observation run; we search for gravitational-wave transients of $2~text{--}~ 500$~s duration in the $24 - 2048$,Hz frequency band with minimal assumptions about signal properties such as waveform morphologies, polarization, sky location or time of occurrence. Targeted signal models include fallback accretion onto neutron stars, broadband chirps from innermost stable circular orbit waves around rotating black holes, eccentric inspiral-merger-ringdown compact binary coalescence waveforms, and other models. The second observation run totals about otwoduration~days of coincident data between November 2016 and August 2017. We find no significant events within the parameter space that we searched, apart from the already-reported binary neutron star merger GW170817. We thus report sensitivity limits on the root-sum-square strain amplitude $h_{mathrm{rss}}$ at $50%$ efficiency. These sensitivity estimates are an improvement relative to the first observing run and also done with an enlarged set of gravitational-wave transient waveforms. Overall, the best search sensitivity is $h_{mathrm{rss}}^{50%}$=$2.7times10^{-22}$~$mathrm{Hz^{-1/2}}$ for a millisecond magnetar model. For eccentric compact binary coalescence signals, the search sensitivity reaches $h_{mathrm{rss}}^{50%}$=$9.6times10^{-22}$~$mathrm{Hz^{-1/2}}$.
We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in the data of the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston second generation detectors between September 2015 and January 2016, with a total observational time of 49 days. The search targets gravitational wave transients of unit[10 -- 500]{s} duration in a frequency band of unit[24 -- 2048]{Hz}, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. No significant events were observed. %All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background, As a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. We also show that the search is sensitive to sources in the Galaxy emitting at least $sim$ unit[$10^{-8}$]{$mathrm{M_{odot} c^2}$} in gravitational waves.