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Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM,General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
The F-statistic is an established method to search for continuous
gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars. Prix et al. (2011) introduced
a variant for transient quasi-monochromatic signals. Possible astrophysical
scenarios for such transients include glitching pulsars, newborn neutron stars
and accreting systems. Here we present a new implementation of the transient
F-statistic, using pyCUDA to leverage the power of modern graphics processing
units (GPUs). The obtained speedup allows efficient searches over much wider
parameter spaces, especially when using more realistic transient signal models
including time-varying (e.g. exponentially decaying) amplitudes. Hence, it can
enable comprehensive coverage of glitches in known nearby pulsars, improve the
follow-up of outliers from continuous-wave searches, and might be an important
ingredient for future blind all-sky searches for unknown neutron stars.
