Searching for gravitational waves from pulsars in binary systems: An all-sky search

Non axisymmetrical neutron stars emit continuous gravitational waves. The periodicity of the system allows for the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio by integrating the signal over time. Many of the known neutron stars are in binary systems and their orbital movement will Doppler-shift the signal. When performing an all sky-search for such systems the use of exact binary motion templates become unfeasible. The Doppler shifts causes the power in the signal to be spread out over a large enough frequency band so that the gain of integrating the signal over the observation time is negligible. Here, the principles of a new analysis method for LIGO and Virgo data, called the polynomial search, will be presented together with first tests on simulated data.