Exploiting Large-Scale Correlations to Detect Continuous Gravitational Waves

Abstract

Fully coherent searches (over realistic ranges of parameter space and year-long observation times) for unknown sources of continuous gravitational waves are computationally prohibitive. Less expensive hierarchical searches divide the data into shorter segments which are analyzed coherently, then detection statistics from different segments are combined incoherently. The novel method presented here solves the long-standing problem of how best to do the incoherent combination. The optimal solution exploits large-scale parameter-space correlations in the coherent detection statistic. Application to simulated data shows dramatic sensitivity improvements compared with previously available (ad hoc) methods, increasing the spatial volume probed by more than 2 orders of magnitude at lower computational cost.

4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

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• Maximum elastic deformations of compact stars with exotic equations of state
• The Einstein@Home search for periodic gravitational waves in LIGO S4 data
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• Parameter-space correlations of the optimal statistic for continuous gravitational-wave detection