Gravity Seminar: Continuous gravitational waves: looking for a tiny signal in a sea of noise, Lorenzo Mirasola, University of Cagliari, Italy

Although the gravitational wave signal emitted by the merging of compact objects, such as black holes or neutron stars, has almost become “normal”, we are far from having the entire picture. In fact, other three kind of signals are expected to be detected, and, among them, there are the Continuous Waves (CWs).

CWs are persistent signals that are expected to be present in the entire run of data taking. The canonical source of CW is a non-axis-symmetric rotating neutron star, which produces a mono-chromatic signal in the source reference frame. CWs have not been detected yet as they have a characteristic amplitude much fainter than the events already found. A plethora of analysis techniques looks for these tiny signals exploiting their persistence, hoping to find outliers that cannot be linked to instrumental anomalies. Up to now, no detection has been claimed. A new data taking run, started in May 2023 with enhanced detector sensitivities and expected to last till beginning of 2025, will give a deeper insight in the CW research field.

After a brief introduction on CWs, this talk will introduce three specific data analysis techniques that will be applied in the future searches.