Search for continuous gravitational waves: Metric of the multi-detector F-statistic
Jun, 200620 pages
Published in:
- Phys.Rev.D 75 (2007) 023004,
- Phys.Rev.D 75 (2007) 069901 (erratum)
e-Print:
- gr-qc/0606088 [gr-qc]
Report number:
- AEI-2006-043
View in:
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Abstract: (arXiv)
We develop a general formalism for the parameter-space metric of the multi-detector F-statistic, which is a matched-filtering detection statistic for continuous gravitational waves. We find that there exists a whole family of F-statistic metrics, parametrized by the (unknown) amplitude parameters of the gravitational wave. The multi-detector metric is shown to be expressible in terms of noise-weighted averages of single-detector contributions, which implies that the number of templates required to cover the parameter space does not scale with the number of detectors. Contrary to using a longer observation time, combining detectors of similar sensitivity is therefore the computationally cheapest way to improve the sensitivity of coherent wide-parameter searches for continuous gravitational waves. We explicitly compute the F-statistic metric family for signals from isolated spinning neutron stars, and we numerically evaluate the quality of different metric approximations in a Monte-Carlo study. The metric predictions are tested against the measured mismatches and we identify regimes in which the local metric is no longer a good description of the parameter-space structure.Note:
- 20 pages, 15 figures, revtex4; v2: some edits of style and notation, fixed minor typos
- 95.75.Pq
- 95.55.Ym
- 04.80.Nn
- 97.60.Jd
- gravitational radiation: search for
- gravitational radiation: particle source
- neutron star
- gravitational radiation detector: network
- signal processing
- statistics
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