In this talk I will review the physical mechanisms that can lead to continuous gravitational wave emission, focusing mainly on the role of neutron stars. I will discuss which physical scenarios can be explored with continuous waves, and review recent searches by the LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA collaboration. I will show, in particular, that the sensitivity of the searches has now reached the point...
We present a multiple test for the targeted search of continuous gravitational waves from an ensemble of known pulsars, combining multidetector single pulsar statistics defined through the 5n-vector method. In order to maximize the detection probability, we describe a rank truncation method to select the most promising sources within the ensemble, based on the p-values computed for single...
The current catalog of gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black hole (BBH) mergers allows to conduct refined tests to probe the validity of the general relativity (GR) theory against alternative predictions. It has been proposed that black holes (BHs) may have exotic characteristics making them different from GR BH, such as exotic compact objects (ECOs): they would produce repeated GW...
Being arguably the most massive binary black hole merger event observed to date, GW190521 deserves special attention. The exceptionally loud ringdown of this merger makes it an ideal candidate to search for gravitational wave echoes, a proposed smoking gun for the quantum structure of black hole horizons. We perform an unprecedented multi-pronged search for echoes via two well-established and...
When it comes to gravitational wave signals, both waveform reconstruction and sky localization benefit from as broad a detector network as possible. And yet, in several instances the contribution of the Virgo detector has not been fully exploited, because the advantages are offset by the overall increase of background noise.
This is especially concerning for multi-messenger events, and it...
While the current sensitivity of the interferometers makes the detection of overlapping signals between two different gravitational waves (GWs) very unlikely, this will be quite common for the next generation of detectors: indeed, the detection rate will be high enough so that the probability to have two or more events at the same time is expected to be very high.
We present the results of...
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA O4 observing run will bring the amount of gravitational wave (GW) detections to an unprecedented level. The full exploitation of this opportunity will be possible if we provide innovative tools for quick data analysis using intuitive grafical user interface. In particular this approach is important in the electromagnetic follow-up decision process, as the time spent on...
