Improved Hough search for gravitational wave pulsars

TL;DR

This paper presents an enhanced Hough transform method for detecting continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars, accounting for detector noise variations and amplitude modulation to improve search sensitivity.

Contribution

The paper introduces modifications to the Hough transform search that incorporate detector noise non-stationarities and amplitude modulation effects during peak selection.

Findings

Improved detection sensitivity for gravitational wave pulsars.

Effective handling of noise non-stationarities and amplitude modulation.

Enhanced robustness of the search method.

Abstract

We describe an improved version of the Hough transform search for continuous gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars assuming the input to be short segments of Fourier transformed data. The method presented here takes into account possible non-stationarities of the detector noise and the amplitude modulation due to the motion of the detector. These two effects are taken into account for the first stage only, i.e. the peak selection, to create the time-frequency map of our data, while the Hough transform itself is performed in the standard way.