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Published June 15, 2014 | Published
Journal Article Open

Measuring neutron-star ellipticity with measurements of the stochastic gravitational-wave background

Abstract

Galactic neutron stars are a promising source of gravitational waves in the analysis band of detectors such as Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo. Previous searches for gravitational waves from neutron stars have focused on the detection of individual neutron stars, which are either nearby or highly nonspherical. Here, we consider the stochastic gravitational-wave signal arising from the ensemble of Galactic neutron stars. Using a population synthesis model, we estimate the single-sigma sensitivity of current and planned gravitational-wave observatories to average neutron star ellipticity ε as a function of the number of in-band Galactic neutron stars N_(tot). For the plausible case of N_(tot)≈53000, and assuming one year of observation time with colocated initial LIGO detectors, we find it to be σ_(ε)=2.1×10^(−7), which is comparable to current bounds on some nearby neutron stars. (The current best 95% upper limits are ε≲7×10^(−8).) It is unclear if Advanced LIGO can significantly improve on this sensitivity using spatially separated detectors. For the proposed Einstein Telescope, we estimate that σε=5.6×10^(−10). Finally, we show that stochastic measurements can be combined with measurements of individual neutron stars in order to estimate the number of in-band Galactic neutron stars. In this way, measurements of stochastic gravitational waves provide a complementary tool for studying Galactic neutron stars.

Additional Information

© 2014 American Physical Society. Received 16 April 2014; published 20 June 2014. We thank Nelson Christensen, Peter Gonthier, Duncan Lorimer, Matthew Pitkin, Keith Riles, and Graham Woan for helpful discussions and comments. We gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation for funding LIGO, and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration for access to this data. This work is supported in part by NSF Grants No. PHY-1205952, No. PHY-1206108, and No. PHY-1307401. E. T. is a member of the LIGO Laboratory, supported by funding from the United States National Science Foundation. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under Grant No. PHY-0757058.

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Published - PhysRevD.89.123008.pdf

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August 20, 2023
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