Prospects for detecting and localizing short-duration transient gravitational waves from glitching neutron stars without electromagnetic counterparts

Neutron stars are known to show accelerated spin-up of their rotational frequency called a glitch. Highly magnetized rotating neutron stars (pulsars) are frequently observed by radio telescopes (and in other frequencies), where the glitch is observed as irregular arrival times of pulses which are otherwise very regular. A glitch in an isolated neutron star can excite the fundamental (f)-mode oscillations which can lead to gravitational wave generation. This gravitational wave signal associated with stellar fluid oscillations has a damping time of 10–200 ms and occurs at the frequency range between 2.2–2.8 kHz for the equation of state and mass range considered in this work, which is within the detectable range of the current generation of ground-based detectors. Electromagnetic observations of pulsars (and hence pulsar glitches) require the pulsar to be oriented so that the jet is pointed toward the detector, but this is not a requirement for gravitational wave emission which is more isotropic and not jetlike. Hence, gravitational wave observations have the potential to uncover nearby neutron stars where the jet is not pointed towards the Earth. In this work, we study the prospects of finding glitching neutron stars using a generic all-sky search for short-duration gravitational wave transients. The analysis covers the high-frequency range from 1–4 kHz of LIGO–Virgo detectors for signals up to a few seconds. We set upper limits for the third observing run of the LIGO–Virgo detectors and present the prospects for upcoming observing runs of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and LIGO India. We find the detectable glitch size will be around 10−5  Hz for the fifth observing run for pulsars with spin frequencies and distances comparable to the Vela pulsar. We also present the prospects of localizing the direction in the sky of these sources with gravitational waves alone, which can facilitate electromagnetic follow-up. We find that for the five detector configuration, the localization capability for a glitch size of 10−5  Hz is around 132  deg2 at 1σ confidence for 50% of events with distance and spin frequency as that of Vela.