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Published August 7, 2009 | public
Journal Article

Stacking gravitational wave signals from soft gamma repeater bursts

Abstract

Soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) have unique properties that make them intriguing targets for gravitational wave (GW) searches. They are nearby, their burst emission mechanism may involve neutron star crust fractures and excitation of quasinormal modes, and they burst repeatedly and sometimes spectacularly. A recent LIGO search for transient GW from these sources placed upper limits on a set of almost 200 individual SGR bursts. These limits were within the theoretically predicted range of some models. We present a new search strategy which builds upon the method used there by "stacking" potential GW signals from multiple SGR bursts. We assume that variation in the time difference between burst electromagnetic emission and burst GW emission is small relative to the GW signal duration, and we time-align GW excess power time-frequency tilings containing individual burst triggers to their corresponding electromagnetic emissions. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we confirm that gains in GW energy sensitivity of N^(1/2) are possible, where N is the number of stacked SGR bursts. Estimated sensitivities for a mock search for gravitational waves from the 2006 March 29 storm from SGR 1900+14 are also presented, for two GW emission models, "fluence-weighted" and "flat" (unweighted).

Additional Information

© 2009 The American Physical Society. Received 30 April 2009; published 7 August 2009. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreements PHY-0107417 and PHY-0757058. The authors are also grateful for the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. PHY- 0457528/0757982, PHY-0555628, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University in the City of New York, and the Pennsylvania State University. We are indebted to many of our colleagues for fruitful discussions, in particular, Richard O'Shaughnessy for his valuable suggestions. This paper has been assigned LIGO document number LIGO-P0900001.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023