A grant for Sudhagar Suyamprakasam to search for microlensed gravitational waves sources.
A member of our group from Copernicus Astronomical Center PAN, Sudhagar Suyamprakasam got a Preludium NCN grant for a project: “Through the lens: discovering continuous gravitational waves amplified by microlensing”.
Non-symmetric rotating neutron stars are prospective sources of quasi-monochromatic (long duration, continuous) gravitational waves. They are yet to be detected as their intrinsic gravitational-wave amplitude is smaller than transient gravitational waves emitted by compact binary systems inspirals of neutron stars and black holes, now routinely detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration network of detectors.
An interesting opportunity to detect continuous waves occurs if a signal is gravitationally microlensed, which means that its waveform is magnified by the gravitational potential of a massive object, positioned near the line of sight between the source and the detector, in a close analogy do the well-known microlensing in the electromagnetic band and temporal increase of the brightness called the Paczyński curve. Detecting this temporal amplification which enhances a weak gravitational wave above the critical threshold will not only lead to the detection of a continuous wave source, but will aid in studying physical properties of the lensing object and the source of a wave, as well as the Galactic population of lensing objects.