Searching for gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars

Rotating neutron stars are one of the important sources of gravitational wa ves (GW) for the ground based as well as space based detectors. Since the w aves are emitted continuously, the source is termed as a continuous gravita tional wave (CGW) source. The expected weakness of the signal requires long integration times (similar to year). The data analysis problem involves tr acking the phase coherently over such large integration times, which makes it the most computationally intensive problem among all GW sources envisage d. In this article, the general problem of data analysis is discussed, and more so, in the context of searching for CGW sources orbiting another compa nion object. The problem is important because there are several pulsars, wh ich could be deemed to be CGW sources orbiting another companion star. Diff erential geometric techniques for data analysis are described and used to o btain computational costs. These results are applied to known systems to as sess whether such systems are detectable with current (or near future) comp uting resources.