Searching for gravitational waves from the Crab pulsar - the problem of timing noise

Abstract

Of the current known pulsars, the Crab pulsar (B0531+21) is one of the most promising sources of gravitational waves. The relatively large timing noise of the Crab causes its phase evolution to depart from a simple spin-down model. This effect needs to be taken in to account when performing time domain searches for the Crab pulsar in order to avoid severely degrading the search efficiency. The Jodrell Bank Crab pulsar ephemeris is examined to see if it can be used for tracking the phase evolution of any gravitational wave signal from the pulsar, and we present a method of heterodyning the data that takes account of the phase wander. The possibility of obtaining physical information about the pulsar from comparisons of the electromagnetically and a gravitationally observed timing noise is discussed. Finally, additional problems caused by pulsar glitches are discussed.

5 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the 5th Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves, Pisa, Italy, 6-11 July 2003

References in corpus (2)

• Data analysis of gravitational-wave signals from spinning neutron stars. I. The signal and its detection
• Characterization of the Crab Pulsar's Timing Noise

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars
• Limits on gravitational wave emission from selected pulsars using LIGO data
• Searches for continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars: A twenty-year retrospective
• Statistical characterization of pulsar glitches and their potential impact on searches for continuous gravitational waves
• The effect of timing noise on targeted and narrow-band coherent searches for continuous gravitational waves from pulsars
• Binary system delays and timing noise in searches for gravitational waves from known pulsars