Statistical characterization of pulsar glitches and their potential impact on searches for continuous gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper statistically analyzes pulsar glitches to assess their impact on continuous gravitational wave searches, revealing that glitches can significantly reduce detection sensitivity and cause missed signals.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical framework to estimate glitch occurrence and their effects on gravitational wave search mismatch, highlighting potential detection challenges.

Findings

Glitches increase the likelihood of signal mismatch in searches.

Many pulsars have a high probability of experiencing glitches during searches.

Glitches can cause substantial loss of signal-to-noise ratio, risking missed detections.

Abstract

Continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars could provide an invaluable resource to learn about their interior physics. A common search method involves matched filtering a modeled template against the noisy gravitational-wave data to find signals. This method suffers a mismatch (i.e., relative loss of the signal-to-noise ratio) if the signal deviates from the template. One possible instance in which this may occur is if the neutron star undergoes a glitch, a sudden rapid increase in the rotation frequency seen in the timing of many radio pulsars. In this work, we use a statistical characterization of the glitch rate and size in radio pulsars to estimate how often neutron star glitches would occur within the parameter space of continuous gravitational-wave searches and how much mismatch putative signals would suffer in the search due to these glitches. We find that for many previous and potential future searches continuous-wave signals have an elevated probability of undergoing one or more glitches and that these glitches will often lead to a substantial fraction of the signal-to-noise ratio being lost. This could lead to a failure to identify candidate gravitational-wave signals in the initial stages of a search and also to the false dismissal of candidates in subsequent follow-up stages.