Probing the millsecond pulsar hypothesis for the GeV excess with gravitational waves
Supervisor Name
Andrew Miller
Supervisor Email
andrew.miller.ligo@gmail.com
University
Nikhef / Utrecht University
Research field
Physics
Bio
I am a postdoctoral scholar at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. My research interests include the detection of gravitational waves from neutron stars, primordial black holes binaries and particle dark matter. I am a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations.
Over ten years ago, Fermi observed an excess of GeV gamma rays from the Galactic Center whose origin is still under debate. One explanation for this excess involves annihilating dark matter; another requires an unresolved population of millisecond pulsars concentrated at the Galactic Center. We have shown in our recent paper that gravitational waves could be used as a way of constraining the origins of this excess. However, we have yet to develop a comprehensive method to perform such a search ourselves, nor have we tested the robustness of our constraints under a varying models for how deformed the neutron stars are or how quickly they rotate. This project will entail creating model-agnostic and realistic distributions for neutron star rotational frequencies and deformation size and evaluating how the gravitational-wave constraints on the millisecond pulsar hypothesis change in response to these distributions.
