On the usefulness of existing Solar-wind models for pulsar timing corrections

Understand

Dispersive delays due to the Solar wind introduce excess noise in high-precision pulsar timing experiments, and must be removed in order to achieve the accuracy needed to detect, e.g., low-frequency gravitational waves.

• In current pulsar timing experiments, this delay is usually removed by approximating the electron density distribution in the Solar wind either as spherically symmetric, or with a two-phase model that describes the contributions from both high- and low-speed phases of the Solar wind.
• However, no dataset has previously been available to test the performance and limitations of these models over extended timescales and with sufficient sensitivity.
• Here we present the results of such a test with an optimal dataset of observations of pulsar J0034-0534, taken with the German stations of LOFAR.