GRAVITATIONAL-WAVES EMITTED BY AN ENSEMBLE OF ROTATING NEUTRON-STARS

We study the possibility to detect the gravitational wave background g enerated by all the neutron stars in the Galaxy with only one gravitat ional wave interferometric detector. The proposed strategy consists in squaring the detector's output and searching for a sidereal modulatio n. The shape of the squared signal is computed for a disk and a halo d istribution of neutron stars. The required noise stability of the inte rferometric detector is discussed. We argue that a possible population of old neutron stars, originating from a high stellar formation rate at the birth of the Galaxy and not emitting as radio pulsars, could be detected by the proposed technique in the low frequency range of inte rferometric experiments.