Gravitational wave background from sub-luminous GRBs: prospects for second and third generation detectors

We assess the detection prospects of a gravitational wave background associated with sub-luminous gamma-ray bursts (SL-GRBs). We assume that the central engines of a significant proportion of these bursts are provided by newly born magnetars and consider two plausible GW emission mechanisms. Firstly, the deformation-induced triaxial GW emission from a newly born magnetar. Secondly, the onset of a secular bar-mode instability, associated with the long lived plateau observed in the X-ray afterglows of many gamma-ray bursts (Corsi & Meszaros 2009a). With regards to detectability, we find that the onset of a secular instability is the most optimistic scenario: under the hypothesis that SL-GRBs associated with secularly unstable magnetars occur at a rate of (48; 80)Gpc^{-3}yr^{-1} or greater, cross-correlation of data from two Einstein Telescopes (ETs) could detect the GW background associated to this signal with a signal-to-noise ratio of 3 or greater after 1 year of observation. Assuming neutron star spindown results purely from triaxial GW emissions, we find that rates of around (130;350)Gpc^{-3}yr^{-1} will be required by ET to detect the resulting GW background. We show that a background signal from secular instabilities could potentially mask a primordial GW background signal in the frequency range where ET is most sen- sitive. Finally, we show how accounting for cosmic metallicity evolution can increase the predicted signal-to-noise ratio for background signals associated with SL-GRBs.

Using temporal distributions of transient events to characterize cosmological source populations

The brightest events in a time series of cosmological transients obey an observation time dependence which is often overlooked. This dependence can be exploited to probe the global properties of electromagnetic and gravitational wave transients (Howell et al. 2007a, Coward & Burman 2005). We describe a new relation based on a peak flux--observation time distribution and show that it is invariant to the luminosity distribution of the sources (Howell et al. 2007b). Applying this relation, in combination with a new data analysis filter, to emph{Swift} gamma-ray burst data, we demonstrate that it can constrain their rate density.