Abstract
All-sky, broadband, coherent searches for gravitational-wave pulsars are computationally limited. It is therefore important to make efficient use of available computational resources, notably by minimizing the number of templates used to cover the signal parameter space of sky position and frequency evolution. For searches over the sky, however, the required template density (determined by the parameter-space metric) is different at each sky position, which makes it difficult in practice to achieve an efficient covering. Previous work on this problem has found various choices of sky and frequency coordinates that render the parameter-space metric approximately constant but that are limited to coherent integration times of either less than a few days or greater than several months. These limitations restrict the sensitivity achievable by hierarchical all-sky searches and hinder the development of follow-up pipelines for interesting gravitational-wave pulsar candidates. We present a new flat parameter-space metric approximation and associated sky and frequency coordinates, which do not suffer from these limitations. Furthermore, the new metric is numerically well conditioned, which facilitates its practical use.
Author
Wette, Karl; Prix, Reinhard
Journal
Physical Review D
Paper Publication Date
2013
Paper Type
Astrostatistics