Event Weighted Tests for Detecting Periodicity in Photon Arrival Times

Abstract

This paper treats the problem of detecting periodicity in a sequence of photon arrival times, which occurs, for example, in attempting to detect gamma-ray pulsars. A particular focus is on how auxiliary information, typically source intensity, background intensity, and incidence angles and energies associated with each photon arrival should be used to maximize the detection power. We construct a class of likelihood-based tests, score tests, which give rise to event weighting in a principled and natural way, and derive expressions quantifying the power of the tests. These results can be used to compare the efficacies of different weight functions, including cuts in energy and incidence angle. The test is targeted toward a template for the periodic lightcurve, and we quantify how deviation from that template affects the power of detection.

References in corpus (1)

• Phase-Resolved Studies of the High-Energy Gamma-Ray Emission from the Crab, Geminga, and Vela Pulsars

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Gamma-ray Activity in the Crab Nebula: The Exceptional Flare of April 2011
• Discovery of Nine Gamma-Ray Pulsars in Fermi-LAT Data Using a New Blind Search Method
• Periodic Emission from the Gamma-ray Binary 1FGL J1018.6-5856
• A Gamma-ray Pulsar Timing Array Constrains the Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Background
• Detection and timing of gamma-ray pulsations from the $707$ Hz pulsar J0952$-$0607
• Extending the Event-weighted Pulsation Search to Very Faint Gamma-ray Sources
• Exploiting Orbital Constraints from Optical Data to Detect Binary Gamma-ray Pulsars
• Optimized Blind Gamma-ray Pulsar Searches at Fixed Computing Budget
• PSR J1906+0722: An Elusive Gamma-ray Pulsar
• Multi-scale time- and frequency-domain likelihood analysis with photon weights
• Efficient blind search: Optimal power of detection under computational cost constraints
• Testing the isotropy of high energy cosmic rays using spherical needlets
• Investigation of gamma-ray variability and glitches of PSR J1420-6048
• Regularizing the Pulsar Timing Array likelihood: A path towards Fourier Space
• Single Pulse Variability in Gamma-ray Pulsars
• Radio and gamma-ray timing of TRAPUM L-band Fermi pulsar survey discoveries
• The anti-glitching gamma-ray pulsar PSR J1522-5735
• Einstein@Home Searches for Gamma-ray Pulsars in the Inner Galaxy
• An updated constraint for the Gravitational Wave Background from the Gamma-ray Pulsar Timing Array
• Gamma-ray Pulsar Emission is Mostly Stable on Timescales from Minutes to Years
• Timing Gamma-ray Pulsars using Gibbs Sampling