Establishing the significance of continuous gravitational-wave detections from known pulsars

Understand

We present a method for assigning a statistical significance to detection candidates in targeted searches for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars, without assuming the detector noise is Gaussian and stationary.

• We take advantage of the expected Doppler phase modulation of the signal induced by Earth's orbital motion, as well as the amplitude modulation induced by Earth's spin, to effectively blind the search to real astrophysical signals from a given location in the sky.
• We use this "sky-shifting" to produce a large number of noise-only data realizations to empirically estimate the background of a search and assign detection significances, in a similar fashion to the use of timeslides in searches for compact binaries.
• We demonstrate the potential of this approach by means of simulated signals, as well as hardware injections into real detector data.