Cross-correlation search for a hot spot of gravitational waves

Abstract

The cross-correlation search has been previously applied to map the gravitational wave (GW) stochastic background in the sky and also to target GW from rotating neutron stars/pulsars. Here we investigate how the cross-correlation method can be used to target a small region in the sky spanning at most a few pixels, where a pixel in the sky is determined by the diffraction limit which depends on the (i) baseline joining a pair of detectors and (ii) detector bandwidth. Here as one of the promising targets, we consider the Virgo cluster— a "hot spot" spanning few pixels— which could contain, as estimates suggest ~10¹¹ neutron stars, of which a small fraction would continuously emit GW in the bandwidth of the detectors. For the detector baselines, we consider advanced detector pairs among LCGT, LIGO, Virgo, ET, etc. Our results show that sufficient signal to noise can be accumulated with integration times of the order of a year if the ellipticity of neutron stars is larger than 10^-6. The results improve for the multibaseline search. This analysis could as well be applied to other likely hot spots in the sky and other possible pairs of detectors.