Nano-Hertz Gravitational Waves Searches with Interferometric Pulsar Timing Experiments

Abstract

We estimate the sensitivity to nano-Hertz gravitational waves of pulsar timing experiments in which two highly-stable millisecond pulsars are tracked simultaneously with two neighboring radio telescopes that are referenced to the same time-keeping subsystem (i.e. "the clock"). By taking the difference of the two time-of-arrival residual data streams we can exactly cancel the clock noise in the combined data set, thereby enhancing the sensitivity to gravitational waves. We estimate that, in the band ($10^{-9}-10^{-8}$) Hz, this "interferometric" pulsar timing technique can potentially improve the sensitivity to gravitational radiation by almost two orders of magnitude over that of single-telescopes. Interferometric pulsar timing experiments could be performed with neighboring pairs of antennas of the forthcoming large arraying projects.

Paper submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters. It is 9 pages long, and includes 2 figures

References in corpus (3)

• The stochastic gravitational-wave background from massive black hole binary systems: implications for observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Dispersion Measure Variations and their Effect on Precision Pulsar Timing
• Pulsar Timing Sensitivity to Very-Low-Frequency Gravitational Waves

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The optimal schedule for pulsar timing array observations