Status and perspectives of Continuous Gravitational Wave searches

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current status and recent results of continuous gravitational wave searches, focusing on signals from neutron stars and potential dark matter signatures, highlighting ongoing challenges and future perspectives.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of continuous gravitational wave search methods, recent experimental results, and discusses future directions in the field.

Findings

No continuous gravitational waves have been detected yet.

Recent searches have placed upper limits on neutron star deformations.

Potential dark matter signatures are being explored in gravitational wave data.

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, including searches for dark matter signatures.