Gravitational-wave radiometry is a powerful tool by which weak signals with unknown signal morphologies are recovered through a process of cross correlation. Radiometry has been used, e.g., to search for persistent signals from known neutron stars such as Scorpius X-1. In this paper, we demonstrate how a more ambitious search--for persistent signals from unknown neutron stars--can be efficiently carried out using folded data, in which an entire ~year-long observing run is represented as a single sidereal day. The all-sky, narrowband radiometer search described here will provide a computationally tractable means to uncover gravitational-wave signals from unknown, nearby neutron stars in binary systems, which can have modulation depths of ~0.1-2 Hz. It will simultaneously provide a sensitive search algorithm for other persistent, narrowband signals from unexpected sources.
@article{arxiv.1504.02158,
title = {All-sky, narrowband, gravitational-wave radiometry with folded data},
author = {Eric Thrane and Sanjit Mitra and Nelson Christensen and Vuk Mandic and Anirban Ain},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.02158},
year = {2015}
}