Towards Robust Gravitational Wave Detection with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Understand

Precision timing of highly stable milli-second pulsars is a promising technique for the detection of very low frequency sources of gravitational waves.

• In any single pulsar, a stochastic gravitational wave signal appears as an additional source of timing noise that can be absorbed by the noise model, and so it is only by considering the coherent response across a network of pulsars that the signal can be distinguished from other sources of noise.
• In the limit where there are many gravitational wave sources in the sky, or many pulsars in the array, the signals produce a unique tensor correlation pattern that depends only on the angular separation between each pulsar pair.
• It is this distinct fingerprint that is used to search for gravitational waves using pulsar timing arrays.