The Physics department colloquia are usually on Friday afternoons at 3 pm in Room 135. Coffee and cookies are served at 2:45 pm in the same room. Anyone is welcome.

The Einstein@Home Search for Gravitational Waves and Neutron Stars
Dr. Bruce Allen, Albert Einstein Institute (Hannover, Germany)

Einstein@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project with more than 350,000 participants. Like other volunteer computing projects, Einstein@Home harvests idle computer cycles from the laptop and desktop computers of the general public. This provides enormous computing power, on the scale of some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, but at very low cost.

I describe the current status of the Einstein@Home search for new neutron stars, using data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), from the Arecibo and Parkes radio telescopes, and from the Fermi gamma-ray satellite. The sensitivity of these searches is limited by computing power, so the Einstein@Home approach allows the detection of weaker signals than more conventional approaches. In the past few years, Eienstein@Home has discovered more than 50 new pulsars, including a number of particularly interesting and exotic systems.