Continuous gravitational waves in ground and space-based detectors

Gravitational wave detection and analysis has delivered some of the most exciting scientific discoveries of recent years, including observations and measurements of transient signals from colliding black holes and neutron stars. The data for these comes from the ground-based LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave instruments and further analysis methods have been developed to detect gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars, and specifically pulsars. Although no such continuous wave sources have been detected yet, the analysis pipelines are well developed and these techniques for continuous gravitational wave detection are also applicable to space-based observations. The newly-formed LISA consortium is developing the instrumentation and analysis tools necessary for a space-based gravitational wave detector to be launched in the early 2030s with support from UKSA. Although LISA will detect gravitational waves at a lower frequency than ground-based detectors. We will develop analysis techniques for this data based on the continuous wave methods devised for the analysis of ground-based data. This is particularly applicable to LISA as we expect a large number of quasi-monochromatic signals to be present in the LISA band from binary systems far away from coalescence. The objective it to study the white dwarf population seen by LISA and its broader impact on stellar evolution.