Gravitational waves from magnetars

We study the emission of gravitational waves produced by the magnetosphere of magnetars. We argue that several features in the spectrum could facilitate the identification of that source. In addition, in cases of extremely large magnetic fields we demonstrate that this emission can contribute to the deviation of the braking index from 3, which is the standard prediction of the magnetic dipole radiation and aligned rotator mechanisms. A similar picture arises if one focuses on the second braking index. Moreover, the braking index depends in a specific way on both the rotational frequency and the strength of the magnetic field which could facilitate the identification of this mechanism with respect to others. We also show that gravitational waves can be produced by polar gap regions due to their rapid charge-discharge process that takes place in timescales from nanosec to microsec. This can provide an alternative way to probe magnetars and test the polar gap model.