Finally

After a long and gruelling process I've finally submitted the paper which provided the bulk of my thesis to the e-print arXiv - it's called Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars. It's been over a year since the main results in this paper was presented in my thesis, but since then there have been a series of modifications, checks, re-calibrations, reviews, and then re-checks to make sure everything wasok . I can't take all the credit for the paper. As with all our results papers it's gone out under the authorship of the entire LIGO Scientific Collaboration (along with Michael Kramer and Andrew Lyne of Jodrell Bank Observatory who helped us with our pulsar data). During the review process there were very many useful additions to the paper in areas in which I'm no expert, along with the general selection of typos, re-wordings and grammatical corrections. And as it's a results paper we also acknowledge the great many people who got our detectors working to the stage where we can start getting results, and who maintain and look after the instruments for us data analysist's benefit.

The final process in the submission to arXiv didn't entirely go without a hitch as on first attempt it didn't like some of my LaTeX, but on second attempt it all went through fine. Now we sit back and wait for two weeks whilst the paper is perused by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) before submitting it to Physical Review D.