Repeated Gravitational Wave Bursts from Cosmic Strings

International audienceA characteristic observational signature of cosmic strings are short duration gravitational wave (GW) bursts. These have been searched for by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration, and will be searched for with LISA. We point out that these burst signals are repeated, since cosmic string loops evolve quasi-periodically in time, and will always appear from essentially the same position in the sky. We estimate the number of GW repeaters for LVK and LISA, and show that the string tension that can be probed scales as detector sensitivity to the sixth power, which raises hope for detection in future GW detectors. The observation of repeated GW bursts from the same cosmic string loop helps distinguish between the GW waveform parameters and the sky-localization