Sources of radiation from neutron stars

TL;DR

This paper reviews potential sources of gravitational radiation from neutron stars, discusses search strategies for different types of sources, and proposes efficient, parallelizable methods for all-sky surveys to detect unseen neutron stars.

Contribution

It introduces a new hierarchical search method that reduces computational load and enhances parallel processing for detecting gravitational waves from neutron stars.

Findings

Hierarchical methods improve sensitivity in gravitational wave searches.

Proposed Fourier-transform replacement reduces floating-point operations.

Method is highly parallelizable for large parameter space searches.

Abstract

I give a brief introduction to the problem of detecting gravitational radiation from neutron stars. After a review of the mechanisms by which such stars may produce radiation, I consider the different search strategies appropriate to the different kinds of sources: isolated known pulsars, neutron stars in binaries, and unseen neutron stars. The problem of an all-sky survey for unseen stars is the most taxing one that we face in analysing data from interferometers. I describe the kinds of hierarchical methods that are now being investigated to reach the maximal sensitivity, and I suggest a replacement for standard Fourier-transform search methods that requires fewer floating-point operations for Fourier-based searches over large parameter spaces, and in addition is highly parallelizable, working just as well on a loosely coupled network of workstations as on a tightly coupled parallel computer.