Experimental signatures of gravitational wave bursters

Abstract

Gravitational wave bursters are sources which emit repeatedly bursts of gravitational waves, and have been recently suggested as potentially interesting candidates for gravitational wave (GW) detectors. Mechanisms that could give rise to a GW burster can be found for instance in highly magnetized neutron stars (the magnetars which explain the phenomenon of soft gamma repeaters), in accreting neutron stars and in hybrid stars with a quark core. We point out that these sources have very distinctive experimental signatures. In particular, as already observed in the gamma-ray bursts from soft gamma repeaters, the energy spectrum of the events is a power-law, dN\sim E^{-γ}dE with γ\simeq 1.6, and they have a distribution of waiting times (the times between one outburst and the next) significantly different from the distribution of uncorrelated events. We discuss possible detection strategies that could be used to search for these events in existing gravitational wave detectors.

arXiv comment4pages, 2 figs

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• The interaction of gravitational waves with strongly magnetized plasmas
• Gravitational wave detection by a spherical antenna: the angular sensitivity of resonators in the TIGA configuration and its variation with sidereal time and galactic longitude
• Active Mass Under Pressure
• Gravitational wave bursts induced by r-mode spin-down of hybrid stars
• Upper limits on the gravitational mass loss of the Galaxy and the LIGO burst searches