Recent LIGO-Virgo discoveries

Identification of long-duration noise transients in LIGO and Virgo

Used percentage veto for LIGO and virgo binary inspiral searches

A challenge for ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo is to understand the origin of non-astrophysical transients that contribute to the background noise, obscuring real astrophysically produced signals. To help this effort, there are a number of environmental and instrumental sensors around the site, recording data in “channels”. We developed a method called the used...

LIGO / VIRGO searches for gravitational radiation in hypernovae

A torus around a stellar mass Kerr black hole can emit about 10% of the spin-energy of the black hole in gravitational radiation, potentially associated with a gamma-ray burst. Wide tori may develop buckling modes by the Papaloizou-Pringle instability and gravitational radiation-reaction forces in the Burke-Thorne approximation. Gravitational wave experiments may discover these emissions in a f...

Noise Line Identification in LIGO S6 and Virgo VSR2

An important goal for LIGO (the Laser Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory) and Virgo is to find periodic sources of gravitational waves. The LIGO and Virgo detectors are sensitive to a variety of noise of non-astrophysical origin, such as instrumental artifacts and environmental disturbances. These artifacts make it difficult to know when a signal is due to a gravitational wave or nois...

Keynote: Recent Discoveries from Paxos

The rapid decrease in the cost of computing and networks has made fault tolerance much cheaper. The gradual increase in the IQ of system designers is leading to a switch from programming hacks to provably fault-tolerant algorithms. These developments have motivated the resumption of archaeological research on Paxos. Some lower-bound theorems have recently been dug up, along with algorithms that...