D. Barta

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with LIGO

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 seconds 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. We also report upper limits on the source rate density per year per Mpc^3 for specific signal models. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves.

Dispersion of gravitational waves in cold spherical interstellar medium

We investigate the propagation of locally plane, small-amplitude, monochromatic gravitational waves through cold compressible interstellar gas in order to provide a more accurate picture of expected waveforms for direct detection. The quasi-isothermal gas is concentrated in a spherical symmetric cloud held together by self-gravitation. Gravitational waves can be treated as linearized perturbations on the background inner Schwarzschild spacetime. The perturbed quantities lead to the field equations governing the gas dynamics and describe the interaction of gravitational waves with matter. The resulted field equations decouple asymptotically for slowly varying short waves to a set of three PDEs of different orders of magnitude. A second-order WKB method provides transport equations for the wave amplitudes. The influence of background curvature already appears in the first-order amplitudes, which gives rise to diffraction. We have shown that the transport equation of these amplitudes provides numerical solutions for the frequency-alteration. The energy dissipating process is responsible for decreasing frequency. The decrease is significantly smaller than the magnitude of the original frequency and exhibits a power-law relationship between original and decreased frequencies. The frequency deviation was examined particularly for the transient signal GW150914. Considering AGNs as larger background structures and high-frequency signals emitted by BNS mergers, the frequency-deviation grows large enough to be relevant in future GW-observations with increased sensitivity.