Parameter-space metric for all-sky semicoherent searches for gravitational-wave pulsars

Understand

The sensitivity of all-sky searches for gravitational-wave pulsars is primarily limited by the finite availability of computing resources.

• Semicoherent searches are a widely-used method of maximizing sensitivity to gravitational-wave pulsars at fixed computing cost: the data from a gravitational-wave detector are partitioned into a number of segments, each segment is coherently analyzed, and the analysis results from each segment are summed together.
• The generation of template banks for the coherent analysis of each segment, and for the summation, requires knowledge of the metrics associated with the coherent and semicoherent parameter spaces respectively.
• We present a useful approximation to the semicoherent parameter-space metric, analogous to that presented in Wette and Prix [Phys.