A method to search for long duration gravitational wave transients from isolated neutron stars using the generalized FrequencyHough

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized FrequencyHough method to detect long-duration gravitational wave signals from isolated neutron stars, expanding the search capabilities for signals with power-law spindown behaviors.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel generalization of the FrequencyHough pipeline to efficiently search for long-duration gravitational waves with power-law spindown characteristics.

Findings

Method can detect signals with various braking indices.

Sensitivity estimates across different FFT lengths.

Potential to explore new parameter space for neutron star signals.

Abstract

We describe a method to detect gravitational waves lasting $O(hours-days)$ emitted by young, isolated neutron stars, such as those that could form after a supernova or a binary neutron star merger, using advanced LIGO/Virgo data. The method is based on a generalization of the FrequencyHough (FH), a pipeline that performs hierarchical searches for continuous gravitational waves by mapping points in the time/frequency plane of the detector to lines in the frequency/spindown plane of the source. We show that signals whose spindowns are related to their frequencies by a power law can be transformed to coordinates where the behavior of these signals is always linear, and can therefore be searched for by the FH. We estimate the sensitivity of our search across different braking indices, and describe the portion of the parameter space we could explore in a search using varying fast Fourier Transform (FFT) lengths.