City and Countryside Revisited. Comparative rent movements in London and the South-East, 1580-1914

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has suggested that 'the city drove the countryside, not the reverse'. This paper assembles new serial data on urban and agricultural rent movements in Kent, Essex and London, from 1580-1914, which enables us to provide a tentative estimate of the strength of the urban variable and the productivity of land across the rural-urban continuum. Our initial findings support the revisionist view, and throw new light on London's position within the wider metropolitan region. Comparative rent movements suggests a greater continuity between town and countryside than has often been assumed, with sharp increases in rental values occurring on the rural-urban fringes of London and the lower Medway valley

Searching for periodic sources with LIGO

We investigate the computational requirements for all-sky, all-frequency searches for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars, using archived data from interferometric gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO. These sources are expected to be weak, so the optimal strategy involves coherent accumulaton of signal-to-noise using Fourier transforms of long stretches of data (months to years). Earth-motion-induced Doppler shifts, and intrinsic pulsar spindown, will reduce the narrow-band signal-to-noise by spreading power across many frequency bins; therefore, it is necessary to correct for these effects before performing the Fourier transform. The corrections can be implemented by a parametrized model, in which one does a search over a discrete set of parameter values. We define a metric on this parameter space, which can be used to determine the optimal spacing between points in a search; the metric is used to compute the number of independent parameter-space points Np that must be searched, as a function of observation time T. The number Np(T) depends on the maximum gravitational wave frequency and the minimum spindown age tau=f/(df/dt) that the search can detect. The signal-to-noise ratio required, in order to have 99% confidence of a detection, also depends on Np(T). We find that for an all-sky, all-frequency search lasting T=10^7 s, this detection threshhold is at a level of 4 to 5 times h(3/yr), where h(3/yr) is the corresponding 99% confidence threshhold if one knows in advance the pulsar position and spin period.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 12 PostScript figures included using psfig. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Multi-frequency study of the Large Magellanic Cloud Supernova Remnant J0529-6653 near Pulsar B0529-66

We report the ATCA and ROSAT detection of Supernova Remnant (SNR) J0529--6653 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) which is positioned in the projected vicinity of the known radio pulsar PSR B0529-66. In the radio-continuum frequencies, this LMC object follows a typical SNR structure of a shell morphology with brightened regions in the south-west. It exhibits an almost circular shape of D=33 x 31 pc (1 pc uncertainty in each direction) and radio spectral index of alpha=-0.68$+-$0.03 - typical for mid-age SNRs. We also report detection of polarised regions with a peak value of 17+-7% at 6 cm. An investigation of ROSAT images produced from merged PSPC data reveals the presence of extended X-ray emission coincident with the radio emission of the SNR. In X-rays, the brightest part is in the north-east. We discuss various scenarios in regards to the SNR-PSR association with emphasis on the large age difference, lack of a pulsar trail and no prominent point-like radio or X-ray source.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves

Gravitational wave detectors are already operating at interesting sensitivity levels, and they have an upgrade path that should result in secure detections by 2014. We review the physics of gravitational waves, how they interact with detectors (bars and interferometers), and how these detectors operate. We study the most likely sources of gravitational waves and review the data analysis methods that are used to extract their signals from detector noise. Then we consider the consequences of gravitational wave detections and observations for physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.Comment: 137 pages, 16 figures, Published version <http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2009-2

Gravitational Waves From Known Pulsars: Results From The Initial Detector Era

We present the results of searches for gravitational waves from a large selection of pulsars using data from the most recent science runs (S6, VSR2 and VSR4) of the initial generation of interferometric gravitational wave detectors LIGO (Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. We do not see evidence for gravitational wave emission from any of the targeted sources but produce upper limits on the emission amplitude. We highlight the results from seven young pulsars with large spin-down luminosities. We reach within a factor of five of the canonical spin-down limit for all seven of these, whilst for the Crab and Vela pulsars we further surpass their spin-down limits. We present new or updated limits for 172 other pulsars (including both young and millisecond pulsars). Now that the detectors are undergoing major upgrades, and, for completeness, we bring together all of the most up-to-date results from all pulsars searched for during the operations of the first-generation LIGO, Virgo and GEO600 detectors. This gives a total of 195 pulsars including the most recent results described in this paper.United States National Science FoundationScience and Technology Facilities Council of the United KingdomMax-Planck-SocietyState of Niedersachsen/GermanyAustralian Research CouncilInternational Science Linkages program of the Commonwealth of AustraliaCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research of IndiaIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of ItalySpanish Ministerio de Economia y CompetitividadConselleria d'Economia Hisenda i Innovacio of the Govern de les Illes BalearsNetherlands Organisation for Scientific ResearchPolish Ministry of Science and Higher EducationFOCUS Programme of Foundation for Polish ScienceRoyal SocietyScottish Funding CouncilScottish Universities Physics AllianceNational Aeronautics and Space AdministrationOTKA of HungaryLyon Institute of Origins (LIO)National Research Foundation of KoreaIndustry CanadaProvince of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and InnovationNational Science and Engineering Research Council CanadaCarnegie TrustLeverhulme TrustDavid and Lucile Packard FoundationResearch CorporationAlfred P. Sloan FoundationAstronom

Einstein@Home all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in LIGO S5 data

This paper presents results of an all-sky searches for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency range [50, 1190] Hz and with frequency derivative ranges of [-2 x 10^-9, 1.1 x 10^-10] Hz/s for the fifth LIGO science run (S5). The novelty of the search lies in the use of a non-coherent technique based on the Hough-transform to combine the information from coherent searches on timescales of about one day. Because these searches are very computationally intensive, they have been deployed on the Einstein@Home distributed computing project infrastructure. The search presented here is about a factor 3 more sensitive than the previous Einstein@Home search in early S5 LIGO data. The post-processing has left us with eight surviving candidates. We show that deeper follow-up studies rule each of them out. Hence, since no statistically significant gravitational wave signals have been detected, we report upper limits on the intrinsic gravitational wave amplitude h0. For example, in the 0.5 Hz-wide band at 152.5 Hz, we can exclude the presence of signals with h0 greater than 7.6 x 10^-25 with a 90% confidence level.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables. Science summary page at http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-FullS5EatH/index.php ; Public access area to figures and tables at https://dcc.ligo.org/cgi-bin/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=p120002

Erratum: “Searches for Gravitational Waves from Known Pulsars at Two Harmonics in 2015–2017 LIGO Data” (2019, ApJ, 879, 10)

Due to an error at the publisher, in the published article the number of pulsars presented in the paper is incorrect in multiple places throughout the text. Specifically, "222" pulsars should be "221." Additionally, the number of pulsars for which we have EM observations that fully overlap with O1 and O2 changes from "168" to "167." Elsewhere, in the machine-readable table of Table 1 and in Table 2, the row corresponding to pulsar J0952-0607 should be excised as well. Finally, in the caption for Table 2 the number of pulsars changes from "188" to "187.

First Search for Gravitational Waves from Known Pulsars with Advanced LIGO

We present the result of searches for gravitational waves from 200 pulsars using data from the first observing run of the Advanced LIGO detectors. We find no significant evidence for a gravitational-wave signal from any of these pulsars, but we are able to set the most constraining upper limits yet on their gravitational-wave amplitudes and ellipticities. For eight of these pulsars, our upper limits give bounds that are improvements over the indirect spin-down limit values. For another 32, we are within a factor of 10 of the spin-down limit, and it is likely that some of these will be reachable in future runs of the advanced detector. Taken as a whole, these new results improve on previous limits by more than a factor of two

Weak Solutions for a Simple Hyperbolic System

The model studied concerns a simple first-order hyperbolic system. The solutions in which one is most interested have discontinuities which persist for all time, and therefore need to be interpreted as weak solutions. We demonstrate existence and uniqueness for such weak solutions, identifying a canonical ` exact' solution which is everywhere defined. The direct method used is guided by the theory of measure-valued diffusions. The method is more effective than the method of characteristics, and has the advantage that it leads immediately to the McKean representation without recourse to Itô's formula. We then conduct computer studies of our model, both by integration schemes (which do use characteristics) and by `random simulation'

Travelling Waves for a Certain First-Order Coupled PDE System

. This paper concentrates on a particular first-order coupled PDE system. It provides both a detailed treatment of the existence and uniqueness of monotone travelling waves to various equilibria, by di#erential-equation theory and by probability theory and a treatment of the corresponding hyperbolic initial-value problem, by analytic methods. The initial-value problem is studied using characteristics to show existence and uniqueness of a bounded solution for bounded initial data (subject to certain smoothness conditions). The concept of weak solutions to partial di#erential equations is used to rigorously examine bounded initial data with jump discontinuities. For the travelling wave problem the di#erential-equation treatment makes use of a shooting argument and explicit calculations of the eigenvectors of stability matrices. The probabilistic treatment is careful in its proofs of martingale (as opposed to merely local-martingale) properties. A modern change-of-measure technique is use..