Physics & Astronomy Colloquium (In-Person): Dr. Alan Knee, University of Michigan

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Elliott (ELL) 168. “ Do neutron stars “hum”? Hunting for continuous gravitational waves ” The growing catalogue of gravitational wave (GW) signals observed by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors has provided astronomers with a completely new view on stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars. One class of GW source that has thus far gone undetected is rapidly rotating, deformed neutron stars, which could emit quasi-monochromatic continuous gravitational waves (CWs). Whereas GWs from compact binary mergers are transient phenomena, CWs are persistent signals that could be monitored over millions or even billions of wave cycles, offering new insights into neutron star structure and composition. In this talk, I will present efforts to search for faint CW signals in noisy detector data, highlighting recent work to make our searches more robust to a broader array of signal morphologies. I will also discuss ongoing work to characterize and mitigate narrowband noise artifacts that degrade the sensitivity of our detectors with respect to CW signals.