Characterizing the sensitivity of isolated continuous gravitational wave searches to binary orbits

Understand

Broadband all-sky searches for continuous gravitational waves (CW) from isolated neutron stars typically yield a number of significant candidates that are discarded through hierarchical semi-coherent and coherent follow-up searches.

• However, these searches target purely isolated sources and do not take into account possible phase modulations to the signals due to companion objects in binary orbits.
• If the source object is in a binary orbit, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a signal will diminish due to the mismatch between the signal waveform and the template waveform used in the search.
• In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of CW searches to signals from sources in binary systems over an exhaustive range of binary orbits.