Testing strengths, limitations and biases of current Pulsar Timing Arrays detection analyses on realistic data

Understand

State-of-the-art searches for gravitational waves (GWs) in pulsar timing array (PTA) datasets model the signal as an isotropic, Gaussian and stationary process described by a power-law.

• In practice, none of these properties are expected to hold for an incoherent superposition of GWs generated by a cosmic ensemble of supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs), which is expected to be the primary signal in the PTA band.
• We perform a systematic investigation of the performance of current search algorithms, using a simple power law model to characterize GW signals in realistic datasets.
• We use, as the baseline dataset, synthetic realisations of timing residuals mimicking the European PTA (EPTA) second data release (DR2).