Search for an emission line of a gravitational wave background

Abstract

In the light of the history of researches on electromagnetic wave spectrum, a sharp emission line of gravitational-wave background (GWB) would be an interesting observational target. Here we study an efficient method to detect a line GWB by correlating data of multiple ground-based detectors. We find that the width of frequency bin for coarse graining is a critical parameter, and the commonly-used value 0.25 Hz is far from optimal, decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio by up to a factor of seven. By reanalyzing the existing data with a smaller bin width, we might detect a precious line signal from the early universe.