All-sky radiometer for narrowband gravitational waves using folded data

TL;DR

This paper presents a new all-sky radiometric method for detecting persistent, narrowband gravitational waves using sidereal-folded data, capable of identifying signals missed by traditional continuous-wave searches.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel radiometry-based algorithm for all-sky narrowband gravitational wave searches that complements existing methods and handles instrumental artifacts effectively.

Findings

Projected strain sensitivity of h_0 ≈ 1.2 × 10^{-24} for LIGO network.

Algorithm effectively handles instrumental lines and detector artifacts.

Demonstrated method on simulated Gaussian noise at LIGO sensitivity.

Abstract

We demonstrate an all-sky search for persistent, narrowband gravitational waves using mock data. The search employs radiometry to sidereal-folded data in order to uncover persistent sources of gravitational waves with minimal assumptions about the signal model. The method complements continuous-wave searches, which are finely tuned to search for gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars while providing a means of detecting more exotic sources that might be missed by dedicated continuous-wave techniques. We apply the algorithm to simulated Gaussian noise at the level of LIGO design sensitivity. We project the strain amplitude sensitivity for the algorithm for a LIGO network in the first observing run to be $h_0 \approx 1.2 \times 10^{-24}$ ($1\%$ false alarm probability, $10\%$ false dismissal probability). We include treatment of instrumental lines and detector artifacts using time-shifted LIGO data from the first observing run.