The LIGO Open Science Center (LOSC) fulfills LIGOs commitment to release, archive, and serve LIGO data in a broadly accessible way to the scientific community and to the public, and to provide the information and tools necessary to understand and use
the data. In August 2014, the LOSC published the full dataset from Initial LIGOs S5 run at design sensitivity, the first such large-scale release and a valuable testbed to explore the use of LIGO data by non-LIGO researchers and by the public, and to help teach gravitational-wave data analysis to students across the world. In addition to serving the S5 data, the LOSC web portal (losc.ligo.org) now offers documentation, data-location and data-quality queries, tutorials and example code, and more. We review the mission and plans of the LOSC, focusing on the S5 data release.
The extremely regular, periodic radio emission from millisecond pulsars makes them useful tools for studying neutron star astrophysics, general relativity, and low-frequency gravitational waves. These studies require that the observed pulse times of
arrival be fit to complex timing models that describe numerous effects such as the astrometry of the source, the evolution of the pulsars spin, the presence of a binary companion, and the propagation of the pulses through the interstellar medium. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of using Bayesian inference to obtain pulsar timing solutions. These benefits include the validation of linearized least-squares model fits when they are correct, and the proper characterization of parameter uncertainties when they are not; the incorporation of prior parameter information and of models of correlated noise; and the Bayesian comparison of alternative timing models. We describe our computational setup, which combines the timing models of Tempo2 with the nested-sampling integrator MultiNest. We compare the timing solutions generated using Bayesian inference and linearized least-squares for three pulsars: B1953+29, J2317+1439, and J1640+2224, which demonstrate a variety of the benefits that we posit.
Inspiraling binaries of compact objects are primary targets for current and future gravitational-wave observatories. Waveforms computed in General Relativity are used to search for these sources, and will probably be used to extract source parameters
from detected signals. However, if a different theory of gravity happens to be correct in the strong-field regime, source-parameter estimation may be affected by a fundamental bias: that is, by systematic errors induced due to the use of waveforms derived in the incorrect theory. If the deviations from General Relativity are not large enough to be detectable on their own and yet these systematic errors remain significant (i.e., larger than the statistical uncertainties in parameter estimation), fundamental bias cannot be corrected in a single observation, and becomes stealth bias. In this article we develop a scheme to determine in which cases stealth bias could be present in gravitational-wave astronomy. For a given observation, the answer depends on the detection signal-to-noise ratio and on the strength of the modified-gravity correction. As an example, we study three representative stellar-mass binary systems that will be detectable with second-generation ground-based observatories. We find that significant systematic bias can occur whether or not modified gravity can be positively detected, for correction strengths that are not currently excluded by any other experiment. Thus, stealth bias may be a generic feature of gravitational-wave detections, and it should be considered and characterized, using expanded models such as the parametrized post-Einstein framework, when interpreting the results of parameter-estimation analyses.
The observations of gravitational-wave signals from astrophysical sources such as binary inspirals will be used to test General Relativity for self consistency and against alternative theories of gravity. I describe a simple formula that can be used
to characterize the prospects of such tests, by estimating the matched-filtering signal-to-noise ratio required to detect non-General-Relativistic corrections of a given magnitude. The formula is valid for sufficiently strong signals; it requires the computation of a single number, the fitting factor between the General-Relativistic and corrected waveform families; and it can be applied to all tests that embed General Relativity in a larger theory, including tests of individual theories such as Brans-Dicke gravity, as well as the phenomenological schemes that introduce corrections and extra terms in the post-Newtonian phasing expressions of inspiral waveforms. The formula suggests that the volume-limited gravitational-wave searches performed with second-generation ground-based detectors would detect alternative-gravity corrections to General-Relativistic waveforms no smaller than 1-10% (corresponding to fitting factors of 0.9 to 0.99).
We review the expected science performance of the New Gravitational-Wave Observatory (NGO, a.k.a. eLISA), a mission under study by the European Space Agency for launch in the early 2020s. eLISA will survey the low-frequency gravitational-wave sky (fr
om 0.1 mHz to 1 Hz), detecting and characterizing a broad variety of systems and events throughout the Universe, including the coalescences of massive black holes brought together by galaxy mergers; the inspirals of stellar-mass black holes and compact stars into central galactic black holes; several millions of ultracompact binaries, both detached and mass transferring, in the Galaxy; and possibly unforeseen sources such as the relic gravitational-wave radiation from the early Universe. eLISAs high signal-to-noise measurements will provide new insight into the structure and history of the Universe, and they will test general relativity in its strong-field dynamical regime.
(abridged) The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is used in gravitational-wave observations as the basic figure of merit for detection confidence and, together with the Fisher matrix, for the amount of physical information that can be extracted from a dete
cted signal. SNRs are usually computed from a sensitivity curve, which describes the gravitational-wave amplitude needed by a monochromatic source of given frequency to achieve a threshold SNR. For interferometric space-based detectors similar to LISA, which are sensitive to long-lived signals and have constantly changing position and orientation, exact SNRs need to be computed on a source-by-source basis. For convenience, most authors prefer to work with sky-averaged sensitivities, accepting inaccurate SNRs for individual sources and giving up control over the statistical distribution of SNRs for source populations. In this paper, we describe a straightforward end-to-end recipe to compute the non-sky-averaged sensitivity of interferometric space-based detectors of any geometry: in effect, we derive error bars for the sky-averaged sensitivity curve, which provide a stringent statistical interpretation for previously unqualified statements about sky-averaged SNRs. As a worked-out example, we consider isotropic and Galactic-disk populations of monochromatic sources, as observed with the classic LISA configuration. We confirm that the (standard) inverse-rms average sensitivity for the isotropic population remains the same whether or not the LISA orbits are included in the computation. However, detector motion tightens the distribution of sensitivities, so for 50% of sources the sensitivity is within 30% of its average. For the Galactic-disk population, the average and the distribution of the sensitivity for a moving detector turn out to be similar to the isotropic case.
Gravitational-wave astronomers often wish to characterize the expected parameter-estimation accuracy of future observations. The Fisher matrix provides a lower bound on the spread of the maximum-likelihood estimator across noise realizations, as well
as the leading-order width of the posterior probability, but it is limited to high signal strengths often not realized in practice. By contrast, Monte Carlo Bayesian inference provides the full posterior for any signal strength, but it is too expensive to repeat for a representative set of noises. Here I describe an efficient semianalytical technique to map the exact sampling distribution of the maximum-likelihood estimator across noise realizations, for any signal strength. This technique can be applied to any estimation problem for signals in additive Gaussian noise.
The Mock LISA Data Challenges are a program to demonstrate LISA data-analysis capabilities and to encourage their development. Each round of challenges consists of one or more datasets containing simulated instrument noise and gravitational waves fro
m sources of undisclosed parameters. Participants analyze the datasets and report best-fit solutions for the source parameters. Here we present the results of the third challenge, issued in Apr 2008, which demonstrated the positive recovery of signals from chirping Galactic binaries, from spinning supermassive--black-hole binaries (with optimal SNRs between ~ 10 and 2000), from simultaneous extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (SNRs of 10-50), from cosmic-string-cusp bursts (SNRs of 10-100), and from a relatively loud isotropic background with Omega_gw(f) ~ 10^-11, slightly below the LISA instrument noise.
The Mock LISA Data Challenges are a programme to demonstrate and encourage the development of LISA data-analysis capabilities, tools and techniques. At the time of this workshop, three rounds of challenges had been completed, and the next was about t
o start. In this article we provide a critical analysis of entries to the latest completed round, Challenge 1B. The entries confirm the consolidation of a range of data-analysis techniques for Galactic and massive--black-hole binaries, and they include the first convincing examples of detection and parameter estimation of extreme--mass-ratio inspiral sources. In this article we also introduce the next round, Challenge 3. Its data sets feature more realistic waveform models (e.g., Galactic binaries may now chirp, and massive--black-hole binaries may precess due to spin interactions), as well as new source classes (bursts from cosmic strings, isotropic stochastic backgrounds) and more complicated nonsymmetric instrument noise.
We describe a simple framework to assess the LISA scientific performance (more specifically, its sensitivity and expected parameter-estimation precision for prescribed gravitational-wave signals) under the assumption of failure of one or two inter-sp
acecraft laser measurements (links) and of one to four intra-spacecraft laser measurements. We apply the framework to the simple case of measuring the LISA sensitivity to monochromatic circular binaries, and the LISA parameter-estimation precision for the gravitational-wave polarization angle of these systems. Compared to the six-link baseline configuration, the five-link case is characterized by a small loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the high-frequency section of the LISA band; the four-link case shows a reduction by a factor of sqrt(2) at low frequencies, and by up to ~2 at high frequencies. The uncertainty in the estimate of polarization, as computed in the Fisher-matrix formalism, also worsens when moving from six to five, and then to four links: this can be explained by the reduced SNR available in those configurations (except for observations shorter than three months, where five and six links do better than four even with the same SNR). In addition, we prove (for generic signals) that the SNR and Fisher matrix are invariant with respect to the choice of a basis of TDI observables; rather, they depend only on which inter-spacecraft and intra-spacecraft measurements are available.
