OctApps: a library of Octave functions for continuous gravitational-wave data analysis

Gravitational waves are minute ripples in spacetime, first predicted by Einsteins general theory of relativity in 1916. Their existence has now been confirmed by the recent success- ful detections of gravitational waves from the collision and merger of binary black holes (Abbott, 2016) and binary neutron stars (Abbott, 2017) in data from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors. Gravitational waves from rapidly-rotating neutron stars, whose shape deviates from perfect axisymmetry, are another potential astrophysi- cal source of gravitational waves, but which so far have not been detected. The search for this type of signals, also known as continuous waves, presents a significant data analysis challenge, as their weak signatures are expected to be buried deep within the instrumen- tal noise of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. For reviews of continuous-wave sources, data analysis techniques, and recent searches of LIGO and Virgo data, see for example Prix (2009) and Riles (2017).