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Abstract

The space of phase parameters (sky position, frequency, spindowns) of a coherent matched-filtering search for continuous gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars shows strong global correlations ('circles in the sky'). In the local limit this can be analysed in terms of a parameter-space metric, but the global properties are less well studied. In this work, we report on our recent progress in understanding these global correlations analytically for short to intermediate (less than a month, say) observation times and neglecting spindowns. The location of these correlation circles in parameter space is found to be determined mostly by the orbital velocity of the earth, while the spin motion of the detector and the antenna patterns only contribute significantly to the amplitude of the detection statistic along these circles.