The canonical signal model in continuous gravitational wave searches is deterministic, and stable over the long integration times needed to separate a putative signal from the noise, e.g. with a matched filter. However, there exist plausible physical mechanisms that give rise to "spin-wandering", i.e. small stochastic variations in the frequency of the gravitational wave. Stochastic variations degrade the sensitivity of matched filters which assume a deterministic frequency evolution. Suites of synthetic spin-wandering injections are performed to infer the loss in sensitivity depth DSW when compared to the depth for a canonical signal Ddet. For a fiducial spin-wandering signal that wanders by ≲5×10−6Hz per day, the depth ratio is Ddet/DSW=4.39−0.27+0.23, 1.51−0.03+0.02, 1.75−0.04+0.04, and 1.07−0.02+0.01 for the coherent F-statistic, semi-coherent F-statistic, CrossCorr, and HMM-Viterbi algorithms respectively. Increasing the coherence time of the semi-coherent algorithms does not necessarily increase their sensitivity to spin-wandering signals.
@article{arxiv.2504.08163,
title = {How much spin wandering can continuous gravitational wave search algorithms handle?},
author = {Julian B. Carlin and Andrew Melatos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08163},
year = {2025}
}