A. Mytidis

Long gravitational-wave transients and associated detection strategies for a network of terrestrial interferometers

Searches for gravitational waves (GWs) traditionally focus on persistent sources (e.g., pulsars or the stochastic background) or on transients sources (e.g., compact binary inspirals or core-collapse supernovae), which last for time scales of milliseconds to seconds. We explore the possibility of long GW transients with unknown waveforms lasting from many seconds to weeks. We propose a novel analysis technique to bridge the gap between short O(s) “burst” analyses and persistent stochastic analyses. Our technique utilizes frequency-time maps of GW strain cross power between two spatially separated terrestrial GW detectors. The application of our cross power statistic to searches for GW transients is framed as a pattern recognition problem, and we discuss several pattern-recognition techniques. We demonstrate these techniques by recovering simulated GW signals in simulated detector noise. We also recover environmental noise artifacts, thereby demonstrating a novel technique for the identification of such artifacts in GW interferometers. We compare the efficiency of this framework to other techniques such as matched filtering.

Constraining the R-mode Saturation Amplitude From a Hypothetical Detection of R-mode Gravitational Waves From a Newborn Neutron Star: Sensitivity Study

This paper consists of two related parts: In the first part we derive an expression of the moment of inertia (MOI) of a neutron star as a function of observables from a hypothetical r-mode gravitational wave detection. For a given r-mode detection we show how the value of the MOI of a neutron star constrains the equation of state (EOS) of the matter in the core of the neutron star. Subsequently, for each candidate EOS, we derive a possible value of the saturation amplitude, \alpha, of the r-mode oscillations on the neutron star. Additionally, we argue that a r-mode detection will provide clues about the cooling rate mechanism of the neutron star. The above physics that can be derived from a hypothetical r-mode detection constitute our motivation for the second part of the paper. In that part we present a detection strategy to efficiently search for r-modes in gravitational-wave data. R-mode signals were injected into simulated noise colored with the advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and Einstein Telescope (ET) sensitivity curves. The r-mode waveforms used are those predicted by early theories based on a polytropic equation of state (EOS) neutron star matter. In our best case scenario \alpha of order 10^{-1}, the maximum detection distance when using the aLIGO sensitivity curve is 1 Mpc (supernova event rate of 3-4 per century) while the maximum detection distance when using the ET sensitivity curve is 10 Mpc (supernova event rate of 1-2 per year).