Optimal strategies for gravitational wave stochastic background searches in pulsar timing data

By M. Anholm, S. Ballmer, Jolien D. E. Creighton, L. Price, X. Siemens. 2008

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A low frequency stochastic background of gravitational waves may be detected by pulsar timing experiments in the next 5 to 10 yr. Using methods developed to analyze interferometric gravitational wave data, in this paper we lay out the optimal techniques to detect a background of gravitational waves using a pulsar timing array. We show that for pulsar distances and gravitational wave frequencies typical of pulsar timing experiments, neglecting the effect of the metric perturbation at the pulsar does not result in a significant deviation from optimality. We discuss methods for setting upper limits using the optimal statistic, show how to construct skymaps using the pulsar timing array, and consider several issues associated with realistic analysis of pulsar timing data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9c5fb3750f1aa69f8110ad96819e9ece0e0368c

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational Radiation Detection with Laser Interferometry (2013, background): “…past three decades, astronomers have used the ever improving timing available for radio antennae and the ever increasing number of known pulsars (Anholm et al. , 2009; Hellings and Downs, 1982; Lorimer, 2008; Van Haasteren et al. , 2009) to search for a stochastic GW background of cosmological…”
Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves (2014, background): “e of arrival of pulses for a pulsar at a distance Lfrom the SolarSystem barycentre (SSB), in the direction of the unit spatial vector p^ induced by a GW travelling in direction of the unit vector is (Anholm et al., 2009)^ z(t; ) =^ 1 2 p^jp^i 1 + ^ p^ hPulsar ij t L c ; ^ hEarth ij (t; )^ = 1 2 ”
Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays (2015, background): “A full mathematical derivation of Γij can be found in Anholm et al. (2009). c© 2014 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–??”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries (2015, methodology): “Consequently, in the last decade several detection techniques have been developed in this direction (e.g. Anholm et al. 2009; van Haasteren et al. 2009; Lentati et al. 2013; Chamberlin et al. 2014) and applied to the EPTA, PPTA, and NANOGrav datasets to get limits on the amplitude of a putative…”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits On An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (2015, methodology): “To compute upper limits with the optimal-statistic, we follow the procedure outlined in Anholm et al. (2009), where the distribution of Â2 is assumed to be a Gaussian with mean A2 and variance σ 20 .”
The NANOGrav 11 Year Data Set: Pulsar-timing Constraints on the Stochastic Gravitational-wave Background (2018, methodology): “Optimal Statistic As in NG9b, we perform a frequentist GWB analysis using the optimal statistic Â2GWB, a point estimator for the amplitude of an isotropic GW stochastic background (Anholm et al. 2009; Chamberlin et al. 2015).”