Banks of templates for directed searches of gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars

TL;DR

This paper develops efficient template banks for directed searches of gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars, enabling fast Fourier transform use and nearly optimal coverage with minimal redundancy.

Contribution

It introduces a method to construct template banks that optimize coverage and computational efficiency for gravitational wave searches from known sky positions.

Findings

Template banks enable fast Fourier transform-based analysis.

Coverage thickness is within 0.1%–16% of optimal hexagonal covering.

Method accommodates data zero padding and folding techniques.

Abstract

We construct efficient banks of templates suitable for directed searches of almost monochromatic gravitational waves originating from spinning nuetron stars in our Galaxy in data being collected by currently operating interferometric detectors. We thus assume that the position of the gravitational-wave source in the sky is known, but we do not assume that the wave's frequency and its derivatives are a priori known. In the construction we employ simplified model of the signal with constant amplitude and phase which is a polynomial function of time. All our template banks enable usage of the fast Fourier transform algorithm in the computation of the maximum-likelihood F-statistic for nodes of the grids defining the bank. We study and employ the dependence of the grid's construction on the choice of the position of the observational interval with respect to the origin of time axis. We also study the usage of the fast Fourier transform algorithms with non-standard frequency resolutions achieved by zero padding or folding the data. In the case of the gravitational-wave signal with one spindown parameter included we have found grids with covering thicknesses which are only 0.1%--16% larger than the thickness of the optimal two-dimensional hexagonal covering.