A coherent method for the detection and estimation of continuous gravitational wave signals using a pulsar timing array

Abstract

The use of a high precision pulsar timing array is a promising approach to detecting gravitational waves in the very low frequency regime ($10^{-6}-10^{-9}$ Hz) that is complementary to the ground-based efforts (e.g., LIGO, Virgo) at high frequencies ($\sim 10-10^3$ Hz) and space-based ones (e.g., LISA) at low frequencies ($10^{-4}-10^{-1}$ Hz). One of the target sources for pulsar timing arrays are individual supermassive black hole binaries that are expected to form in galactic mergers. In this paper, a likelihood based method for detection and estimation is presented for a monochromatic continuous gravitational wave signal emitted by such a source. The so-called pulsar terms in the signal that arise due to the breakdown of the long-wavelength approximation are explicitly taken into account in this method. In addition, the method accounts for equality and inequality constraints involved in the semi-analytical maximization of the likelihood over a subset of the parameters. The remaining parameters are maximized over numerically using Particle Swarm Optimization. Thus, the method presented here solves the monochromatic continuous wave detection and estimation problem without invoking some of the approximations that have been used in earlier studies.

33 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (4)

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• Tempo2, a new pulsar timing package. II: The timing model and precision estimates
• Gravitational waves from resolvable massive black hole binary systems and observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
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• On using inspiralling supermassive binary black holes in the PTA frequency band as standard sirens to constrain dark energy
• Extending the frequency reach of pulsar timing array based gravitational wave search without high cadence observations
• Noise in pulsar timing arrays
• On Detecting Nearby Nano-Hertz Gravitational Wave Sources via Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Parameter-Estimation Biases for Eccentric Supermassive Binary Black Holes in Pulsar Timing Arrays: Biases Caused by Ignored Pulsar Terms
• Statistical Analyses for NANOGrav 5-year Timing Residuals