Abstract. We consider the detection and initial guess problems for the LISA gravitational wave detector. The detection problem is the problem of how to determine if there is a signal present in instrumental data and how to identify it. Because of the Doppler and plane-precession spreading of the spectral power of the LISA signal, the usual power spectrum approach to detection will have difficulty identifying many sources. The initial guess problem involves how to generate a priori values for the parameters of a parameter-estimation problem that are close enough to the final values for a linear least-squares estimator to converge to the correct result. A useful approach to simultaneously solving the detection and initial guess problems for LISA is to divide the sky into many pixels and to demodulate the Doppler spreading for each set of pixel coordinates. The demodulated power spectra may then be searched for spectral features. We demonstrate that the procedure works well as a first step in the search for gravitational waves from monochromatic binaries.

PACS numbers: 04.80.Nn, 95.55.Ym, 95.75.Wx

Print publication: Issue 6 (21 March 2003)
Received 13 June 2002, in final form 9 December 2002
Published 19 February 2003