English

How much spin wandering can continuous gravitational wave search algorithms handle?

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-04-14 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

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 DSWD_{\rm SW} when compared to the depth for a canonical signal DdetD_{\rm det}. For a fiducial spin-wandering signal that wanders by 5×106\lesssim5 \times 10^{-6}\,Hz per day, the depth ratio is Ddet/DSW=4.390.27+0.23D_{\rm det} / D_{\rm SW}=4.39^{+0.23}_{-0.27}, 1.510.03+0.021.51^{+0.02}_{-0.03}, 1.750.04+0.041.75^{+0.04}_{-0.04}, and 1.070.02+0.011.07^{+0.01}_{-0.02} for the coherent FF-statistic, semi-coherent FF-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.

Keywords

Cite

@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}
}

Comments

16 pages, 7 figures. Published in PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:54:18.737Z