Status and Perspectives of Continuous Gravitational Wave Searches

Abstract

The birth of gravitational wave astronomy was triggered by the first detection of a signal produced by the merger of two compact objects (also known as a compact binary coalescence event). The following detections made by the Earth-based network of advanced interferometers had a significant impact in many fields of science: astrophysics, cosmology, nuclear physics and fundamental physics. However, compact binary coalescence signals are not the only type of gravitational waves potentially detectable by LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. An interesting family of still undetected signals, and the ones that are considered in this review, are the so-called continuous waves, paradigmatically exemplified by the gravitational radiation emitted by galactic, fast-spinning isolated neutron stars with a certain degree of asymmetry in their mass distribution. In this work, I will review the status and the latest results from the analyses of advanced detector data.

Keywords

• continuous gravitational waves
• neutron stars
• dark matter
• LIGO
• Virgo
• KAGRA