A method for detecting continuous gravitational wave signals from an ensemble of known pulsars

This work describes a method to improve the detection efficiency for continuous gravitational waves by combining information from known pulsars, which emission is too low to be individually detectable. We propose a new ensemble statistic t, which combines statistics from individual pulsars, defined through the five-vector method. Using a collection of band sample data files from the LIGO science run O2, we test the method with software injections in order to study the statistical properties of t. We also study the performance of our method by varying the number of injected signals and their amplitude. We propose and test a possible strategy for the application of the ensemble method to a set of real pulsars.