Probing circular polarization in stochastic gravitational wave background with pulsar timing arrays

Understand

We study the detectability of circular polarization in a stochastic gravitational wave background from various sources such as supermassive black hole binaries, cosmic strings, and inflation in the early universe with pulsar timing arrays.

• We calculate generalized overlap reduction functions for the circularly polarized stochastic gravitational wave background.
• We find that the circular polarization can not be detected for an isotropic background.
• However, there is a chance to observe the circular polarization for an anisotropic gravitational wave background.