Timing stability of millisecond pulsars and prospects for gravitational-wave detection

By J. Verbiest, M. Bailes, William A. Coles, G. Hobbs, Willem van Straten, David J. Champion, Fredrick A. Jenet, R. Manchester, N. Bhat, J. Sarkissian and 4 more. 2009

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Analysis of high-precision timing observations of an array of " 20 millisecond pulsars (a socalled “timing array”) may ultimately result in the detection of a stochastic gravitational-wave background. The feasibility of such a detection and the required duration of this type of experiment are determined by the achievable rms of the timing residuals and the timing stability of the pulsars involved. We present results of the first long-term, high-precision timing campaign on a large sample of millisecond pulsars used in gravitational-wave detection projects. We show that the timing residuals of most pulsars in our sample do not contain significant lowfrequency noise that could limit the use of these pulsars for decade-long gravitational-wave detection efforts. For our most precisely timed pulsars, intrinsic instabilities of the pulsars or the observing system are shown to contribute to timing irregularities on a five-year timescale below the 100 ns level. Based on those results, realistic sensitivity curves for planned and ongoing timing array efforts are determined. We conclude that prospects for detection of a gravitational-wave background through pulsar timing array efforts within five years to a decade are good.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/637b30671b8064ee04a6b6a843de6e41d0a38dc4

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Citations in the corpus

Pulsar timing analysis in the presence of correlated noise (2011, methodology): “Irregular sampling is not a problem for any of the other pulsars in the Verbiest et al (2009) data set for which τ0 ≪ Tobs, because the distribution of time differences τ between sample pairs, is much more uniform than the distribution of sample times.”
Measurement and correction of variations in interstellar dispersion in high-precision pulsar timing (2012, background): “However, the subset of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) is stable enough that other red signals are potentially measurable (Verbiest et al. 2009).”
The High Time Resolution Universe Pulsar Survey - I. System configuration and initial discoveries (2010, background): “Furthermore, timing of MSPs provides highly accurate parameters (Verbiest et al. 2009) possibly leading to the detection of gravitational waves in the near future (Hobbs et al. 2009).”
ASSESSING THE ROLE OF SPIN NOISE IN THE PRECISION TIMING OF MILLISECOND PULSARS (2010, methodology): “We have excluded the 12.5 yr measurements of timing noise in PSR B1937+21 reported in Verbiest et al. (2009) because the time series contained a long gap between observations with two different instruments.”
Development of a Pulsar-Based Time-Scale (2012, methodology): “Hence, we have been able to remove most, but not all, of the arbitrary offsets from the timing model that were included in the Verbiest et al. (2008, 2009) analyses [details are given in Manchester et al. (2012)].”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, methodology): “Similarly, Verbiest et al. (2009) presented 20-cm data for all 20 PPTA pulsars with data spans ranging from 3.9 years to 14.2 years recorded between 1994 and 2008.”
Gravitational wave astronomy of single sources with a pulsar timing array (2011, background): “Although several pulsars have timing residuals that are essentially white (Verbiest et al. 2009) at the current level of accuracy, it is still an unanswered question as to whether the residuals remain white for much higher timing precision or for much longer observing span.”
The International Pulsar Timing Array project: using pulsars as a gravitational wave detector (2009, methodology): “More recently Verbiest et al. (2009) studied the timing stability for a sample of 20 millisecond pulsars over time scales of up to 10 yr.”
Testing Relativistic Gravity with Radio Pulsars (2014, background): “738+0333 | The best test for scalar-tensor gravity The best \pulsar clocks" are found amongst the fully recycled millisecond pulsars, which have rotational periods less than about 10ms (see e.g. [80]). A result of the stable mass transfer between companion and pulsar in the past | responsible f”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2009, methodology): “The pulsar models are based on those of Verbiest et al. (2009) and we correct the dispersion measure variations as described by Keith et al. (2012).”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, methodology): “While this has been done to some degree for each PTA separately, the phase-offsets between PTAs were not measured based on the template profiles – and in either case such information was unavailable for the historic data (sub)sets from Kaspi et al. (1994) and Verbiest et al. (2009).”
The relativistic pulsar-white dwarf binary PSR J1738+0333 - II. The most stringent test of scalar-tensor gravity (2012, background): “This highlights the importance of accurate and dense multi-frequency TOA measurements and precise c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 DM corrections when attempting to detect such waves with pulsar timing (Verbiest et al. 2009).”