Gravitational Wave Parity-Violating Strain from Pulsar Glitches in Chern-Simons Modified Gravity

Abstract

We investigate gravitational-wave birefringence from pulsar glitches in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity, a parity-violating extension of general relativity motivated by string theory and quantum gravity. Using the Hartle-Thorne slow-rotation formalism to model the neutron star background and a perturbative treatment of the Chern-Simons coupling $α$, we derive the modified Regge-Wheeler equation governing axial gravitational perturbations and compute the resulting polarization-dependent phase shift. The parity-violating interaction produces a fractional asymmetry between the right- and left-handed circular polarizations that scales as $α^2$, grows linearly with frequency and rotation rate, and falls as the fourth power of the stellar radius. For a constant-density interior model we obtain an analytic matching solution for the background scalar field, and show that the interior curvature factor vanishes identically--the interior solution being conformally flat--so that the scalar dipole is sourced entirely in the vacuum exterior; a centrally condensed equation of state can only increase the predicted signal. We further extend the analysis to a two-fluid model incorporating differential rotation between the neutron superfluid and the charged component; the resulting correction is bounded by the fractional glitch amplitude itself, independently of the equation of state, and is negligible for typical pulsar parameters. Expressed through the dimensionless quantity $ζ\propto αM/R_\star^{3}$, the fractional polarization asymmetry for millisecond pulsars reaches $\sim 10^{-3}$ at kilohertz frequencies at the boundary of perturbative validity--four orders of magnitude above the sensitivity of current ground-based detectors to strain asymmetries. However, realistic bounds are limited by the signal-to-noise ratio required to resolve a ratio of gravitational wave strains.