scholarly journals New Searches for Continuous Gravitational Waves from Seven Fast Pulsars

2021 ◽  
Vol 923 (1) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
A. Ashok ◽  
B. Beheshtipour ◽  
M. A. Papa ◽  
P. C. C. Freire ◽  
B. Steltner ◽  
...  

Abstract We conduct searches for continuous gravitational waves from seven pulsars that have not been targeted in continuous wave searches of Advanced LIGO data before. We target emission at exactly twice the rotation frequency of the pulsars and in a small band around such a frequency. The former search assumes that the gravitational-wave quadrupole is changing in a phase-locked manner with the rotation of the pulsar. The latter search over a range of frequencies allows for differential rotation between the component emitting the radio signal and the component emitting the gravitational waves, for example the crust or magnetosphere versus the core. Timing solutions derived from the Arecibo 327 MHz Drift-Scan Pulsar Survey observations are used. No evidence of a signal is found and upper limits are set on the gravitational-wave amplitude. For one of the pulsars we probe gravitational-wave intrinsic amplitudes just a factor of 3.8 higher than the spin-down limit, assuming a canonical moment of inertia of 1038 kg m2. Our tightest ellipticity constraint is 1.5 × 10−8, which is a value well within the range of what a neutron star crust could support.

2021 ◽  
Vol 922 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
R. Abbott ◽  
T. D. Abbott ◽  
S. Abraham ◽  
F. Acernese ◽  
K. Ackley ◽  
...  

Abstract We present a search for continuous gravitational-wave emission due to r-modes in the pulsar PSR J0537–6910 using data from the LIGO–Virgo Collaboration observing run O3. PSR J0537–6910 is a young energetic X-ray pulsar and is the most frequent glitcher known. The inter-glitch braking index of the pulsar suggests that gravitational-wave emission due to r-mode oscillations may play an important role in the spin evolution of this pulsar. Theoretical models confirm this possibility and predict emission at a level that can be probed by ground-based detectors. In order to explore this scenario, we search for r-mode emission in the epochs between glitches by using a contemporaneous timing ephemeris obtained from NICER data. We do not detect any signals in the theoretically expected band of 86–97 Hz, and report upper limits on the amplitude of the gravitational waves. Our results improve on previous amplitude upper limits from r-modes in J0537-6910 by a factor of up to 3 and place stringent constraints on theoretical models for r-mode-driven spin-down in PSR J0537–6910, especially for higher frequencies at which our results reach below the spin-down limit defined by energy conservation.


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Tenorio ◽  
David Keitel ◽  
Alicia M. Sintes

Continuous gravitational waves are long-lasting forms of gravitational radiation produced by persistent quadrupolar variations of matter. Standard expected sources for ground-based interferometric detectors are neutron stars presenting non-axisymmetries such as crustal deformations, r-modes or free precession. More exotic sources could include decaying ultralight boson clouds around spinning black holes. A rich suite of data-analysis methods spanning a wide bracket of thresholds between sensitivity and computational efficiency has been developed during the last decades to search for these signals. In this work, we review the current state of searches for continuous gravitational waves using ground-based interferometer data, focusing on searches for unknown sources. These searches typically consist of a main stage followed by several post-processing steps to rule out outliers produced by detector noise. So far, no continuous gravitational wave signal has been confidently detected, although tighter upper limits are placed as detectors and search methods are further developed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 502 (4) ◽  
pp. 4680-4688
Author(s):  
Ankan Sur ◽  
Brynmor Haskell

ABSTRACT In this paper, we study the spin-evolution and gravitational-wave luminosity of a newly born millisecond magnetar, formed either after the collapse of a massive star or after the merger of two neutron stars. In both cases, we consider the effect of fallback accretion; and consider the evolution of the system due to the different torques acting on the star, namely the spin-up torque due to accretion and spin-down torques due to magnetic dipole radiation, neutrino emission, and gravitational-wave emission linked to the formation of a ‘mountain’ on the accretion poles. Initially, the spin period is mostly affected by the dipole radiation, but at later times, accretion spin the star up rapidly. We find that a magnetar formed after the collapse of a massive star can accrete up to 1 M⊙, and survive on the order of 50 s before collapsing to a black hole. The gravitational-wave strain, for an object located at 1 Mpc, is hc ∼ 10−23 at kHz frequencies, making this a potential target for next-generation ground-based detectors. A magnetar formed after a binary neutron star merger, on the other hand, accretes at the most 0.2 M⊙ and emits gravitational waves with a lower maximum strain of the order of hc ∼ 10−24, but also survives for much longer times, and may possibly be associated with the X-ray plateau observed in the light curve of a number of short gamma-ray burst.


2020 ◽  
Vol 501 (1) ◽  
pp. 701-712
Author(s):  
N Yonemaru ◽  
S Kuroyanagi ◽  
G Hobbs ◽  
K Takahashi ◽  
X-J Zhu ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Cosmic strings are potential gravitational-wave (GW) sources that can be probed by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). In this work we develop a detection algorithm for a GW burst from a cusp on a cosmic string, and apply it to Parkes PTA data. We find four events with a false alarm probability less than 1 per cent. However further investigation shows that all of these are likely to be spurious. As there are no convincing detections we place upper limits on the GW amplitude for different event durations. From these bounds we place limits on the cosmic string tension of Gμ ∼ 10−5, and highlight that this bound is independent from those obtained using other techniques. We discuss the physical implications of our results and the prospect of probing cosmic strings in the era of Square Kilometre Array.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (12) ◽  
pp. 1742005 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Caldwell ◽  
C. Devulder ◽  
N. A. Maksimova

The dynamics of a gravitational wave propagating through a cosmic gauge field are dramatically different than in vacuum. We show that a gravitational wave acquires an effective mass, is birefringent, and its normal modes are a linear combination of gravitational waves and gauge field excitations, leading to the phenomenon of gravitational wave–gauge field oscillations. These surprising results provide an insight into gravitational phenomena and may suggest new approaches to a theory of quantum gravity.


Author(s):  
Ram Brustein ◽  
Yotam Sherf

The response of a gravitating object to an external tidal field is encoded in its Love numbers, which identically vanish for classical black holes (BHs). Here we show, using standard time-independent quantum perturbation theory, that for a quantum BH, generically, the Love numbers are nonvanishing and negative. We calculate the quadrupolar electric quantum Love number of slowly rotating BHs and show that it depends most strongly on the first excited level of the quantum BH. Finally, we discuss the detectability of the quadrupolar quantum Love number in future precision gravitational-wave observations and show that, under favourable circumstances, its magnitude is large enough to imprint an observable signature on the gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral. Phase of two moderately spinning BHs.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaibhav Kalvakota

The September 14, 2015 gravitational wave observations showed the inspiral of two black holes observed from Hanford and Livingston LIGO observatories. This detection was significant for two reasons: firstly, it coupled the result and avoided the possibility of a false alarm by 5σ , meaning that the detected “noise” was indeed from an astronomical source of gravitational waves. We will discuss the primary landscape of gravitational waves, their mathematical structure and how they can be used to predict the masses of the merger system. We will also discuss gravitational wave detector optimisations, and then we will consider the results from the detected merger GW150914. We will consider a straight-forward mathematical approach, and we will primarily be interested in the mathematical modelling of gravitational waves from General Relativity (Section 1). We will first consider a “perturbed” Minkowski metric, and then we will discuss the properties of the perturbation addition tensor. We will then discuss on the gravitational field tensor, and how it arises from the perturbation tensor. We will then talk about the gauge condition, essentially the gauge “freedom” , and then we will talk about the curvature tensor, leading eventually to the effect of gravitational waves on a ring of particles. We will consider the polarisation tensor, which maps the amplitude and polarisation details. The polarisation splits into plus polarised and cross polarised waves, which is technically the effect of a propagating gravitational wave through a ring of particles. We will then talk about the linearized Einstein Field Equations, and how the physical system of merger is encoded into the mathematical structural unity of the metric. We will then talk about the detection of these gravitational waves and how the detector can be optimised, or how the detector can be set so that any “noise” detected can fall in the error margins, and how the detector can prevent the interferometric “photon-noise” from being detected (Section 2.2). Then, we will discuss data results from the source GW150914 detection by LIGO (Section 3).


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Amit Singh ◽  
Ivan Li ◽  
Otto Hannuksela ◽  
Tjonnie Li ◽  
Kyungmin Kim

Gravitational waves are theorized to be gravitationally lensed when they propagate near massive objects. Such lensing effects cause potentially detectable repeated gravitational wave patterns in ground- and space-based gravitational wave detectors. These effects are difficult to discriminate when the lens is small and the repeated patterns superpose. Traditionally, matched filtering techniques are used to identify gravitational-wave signals, but we instead aim to utilize machine learning techniques to achieve this. In this work, we implement supervised machine learning classifiers (support vector machine, random forest, multi-layer perceptron) to discriminate such lensing patterns in gravitational wave data. We train classifiers with spectrograms of both lensed and unlensed waves using both point-mass and singular isothermal sphere lens models. As the result, classifiers return F1 scores ranging from 0:852 to 0:996, with precisions from 0:917 to 0:992 and recalls ranging from 0:796 to 1:000 depending on the type of classifier and lensing model used. This supports the idea that machine learning classifiers are able to correctly determine lensed gravitational wave signals. This also suggests that in the future, machine learning classifiers may be used as a possible alternative to identify lensed gravitational wave events and to allow us to study gravitational wave sources and massive astronomical objects through further analysis. KEYWORDS: Gravitational Waves; Gravitational Lensing; Geometrical Optics; Machine Learning; Classification; Support Vector Machine; Random Tree Forest; Multi-layer Perceptron


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