The noise properties of 42 millisecond pulsars from the European Pulsar Timing Array and their impact on gravitational wave searches

Understand

The sensitivity of Pulsar Timing Arrays to gravitational waves depends on the noise present in the individual pulsar timing data.

• Noise may be either intrinsic or extrinsic to the pulsar.
• Intrinsic sources of noise will include rotational instabilities, for example.
• Extrinsic sources of noise include contributions from physical processes which are not sufficiently well modelled, for example, dispersion and scattering effects, analysis errors and instrumental instabilities.