Searches for continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars: A twenty-year retrospective [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07106


Seven years after the first direct detection of gravitational waves, from the collision of two black holes, the field of gravitational wave astronomy is firmly established. A first detection of continuous gravitational waves from rapidly-spinning neutron stars could be the field’s next big discovery. I review the last twenty years of efforts to detect continuous gravitational waves using the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors. I summarise the model of a continuous gravitational wave signal, the challenges to finding such signals in noisy data, and the data analysis algorithms that have been developed to address those challenges. I present a quantitative analysis of 291 continuous wave searches from 78 papers, published from 2003 to 2022, and compare their sensitivities and coverage of the signal model parameter space.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Wette
Mon, 15 May 23
13/53

Comments: 43 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables. Invited review for special issue of Astroparticle Physics: ‘Gravitational Waves and Multi-messenger Astrophysics’. A machine-readable version of Table A.3 is provided in the ancillary files