In this paper we present a hierarchical data analysis pipeline for all-sky searches of continuous gravitational wave signals, like those emitted by spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to the rotation axis, with unknown position, rotational frequency and spin-down. The core of the pipeline is an incoherent step based on a particularly efficient implementation of the Hough transform, that we call frequency-Hough, that maps the data time-frequency plane to the source frequency/spin-down plane for each fixed direction in the sky. Theoretical ROCs and sensitivity curves are computed and the dependency on various thresholds is discussed. A comparison of the sensitivity loss with respect to an "optimal" method is also presented. Several other novelties, with respect to other wide-parameter analysis pipelines, are also outlined. They concern, in particular, the construction of the grid in the parameter space, with over-resolution in frequency and parameter refinement, candidate selection and various data cleaning steps which are introduced to improve search sensitivity and rejection of false candidates.
@article{arxiv.1407.8333,
title = {Method for all-sky searches of continuous gravitational wave signals using the frequency-Hough transform},
author = {Pia Astone and Alberto Colla and Sabrina D'Antonio and Sergio Frasca and Cristiano Palomba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.8333},
year = {2015}
}