The Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background from Magnetars
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper presents spectrum of the stochastic gravitational waves stochastic background from magnetar excitations for different models and computes the prospect for their detection with the current and future ground based GW detectors. The idea itself is throughly explored in the past literature as the authors themselves identify, the authors provide modifications to these models. These modifications are not well motivated in the text. The interpretation of the results in terms of their potential detectability lacks soundness.
Some of my comments which authors can take into account, before I can approve this paper for publication as follows
a- In section 2 it is not clear to me what is the R(z) which is considered for equation 6, it would be better if this is spelt out explicitly here in the paper
b- Figure 2 and 4 please fix the plotting artefact where the detectors' PSD are not in the plot
c- Refer to arXiv: 1911.09745 for the definition of the detector energy spectrum, the current ones do not look right in the order of magnitude for cosmic explorer.
d - Please clarify what is meant by eccentricity here, I believe ellipticity is the correct term for elliptical deformation of the NS
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper produces an estimate for the stochastic background of gravitational-waves from magnetars. In addition to the comments below, I think it needs a strong edit by an English speaker in the field, for example 22: "to have a strong level of classification results" is very weird, and could be quite confusing to readers. I think there is a lot of work to do before this paper can be published. For example, the introduction is missing a discussion of existing gravitational-wave searches for magnetars, i.e. 1902.01557, etc. It is also missing a (much needed) discussion of work like 1509.07651, which should explain what is going to be different about the calculation done here. There is also very little discussion of the figures in the text (or even in the captions). For example, 175: "But for the both configuration higher eccentricity makes the system more plausible to find" but Advanced LIGO (projected limit? 1 year of integration?) is not even shown on the plot, and the curves are also far below CE ( projected limit? 1 year of integration?). In summary, interesting work, but much work needs to be done to explain what is shown.
15-16: "the Advanced LIGO and VIRGO team" -> both Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo need the standard citations.
22-25: as I think the authors are referring to multi-messenger analyses from the BNS and others, papers along those lines (2002.11355, etc.) should be cited. 38: KAGRA needs citation 43: Why is GWs re-accronymed? and 45: lowercase?! 98: not a complete sentence - Figure 1: axes labels should be as large as text and the legend should have notation like $10^{48}$ etc. - Figure 2: also needs axes labels and discussions of what the CE and advanced LIGO spectra are doing on a plot with the energy density? - Figure 3: axes labels, scientific notation, and no discussion of the blue band - Figure 4: same comments as Figure 2 - Figure 5: axes labels and scientific notation
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors have addressed my comments sufficiently well, and I can recommend this paper for publication.
Author Response
Reviewer 1 already accepted the paper.
Reviewer 2 Report
I think the authors for the revision. I think it is basically ready to be accepted. The captions of figures still need to explain the parameters used for the GW background limit estimates. The whole paper also still needs a strong edit by a native English speaker.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
