Gravitational wave searches with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo

Abstract

Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo are expected to make the first direct detections of gravitational waves (GW) in the next several years. Possible types of GW emission include short-duration bursts, signals from the coalescence of compact binaries consisting of neutron stars or black holes, continuous radiation from fast-spinning neutron stars, and stochastic background radiation of a primordial nature or resulting from the superposition of a large number of individually unresolvable sources. We describe the different approaches that have been developed to search for these different types of signals. In this paper we focus on the GW detection methods themselves; multi-messenger searches as well as further science enabled by detections are dealt with in separate contributions to this volume.