Comparing Repeated Gravitational-Wave Bursts Emitted by Cosmic Strings

Abstract

The principal energy loss mechanism in a Nambu-Goto cosmic string network involves loop production and the subsequent gravitational-wave emission. Recently, it has been shown that the loop oscillations produce repeated gravitational-wave bursts emitted at cusps. The calculations are extended to estimate the number of burst repeaters, including kink emissions and kink-kink collisions. Our findings indicate that despite the potentially large number of kinks, we anticipate observing a higher number of burst repeaters from cusps for both LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. We also conduct calculations using the second main loop distribution model in the current literature. We find that this model predicts a notably higher number of repeaters, which provides a reason to include it in future data analysis. These results offer insights into the potential observability of different loop features for future detectors, such as the space-based laser interferometers Taiji and TianQin.