Detection and localization of continuous gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays: the role of pulsar terms

Abstract

A pulsar timing array is a Galactic-scale detector of nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs). Its target signals contain two components: the `Earth term' and the `pulsar term' corresponding to GWs incident on the Earth and pulsar respectively. In this work we present a Frequentist method for the detection and localization of continuous waves that takes into account the pulsar term and is significantly faster than existing methods. We investigate the role of pulsar terms by comparing a full-signal search with an Earth-term-only search for non-evolving black hole binaries. By applying the method to synthetic data sets, we find that (i) a full-signal search can slightly improve the detection probability (by about five percent); (ii) sky localization is biased if only Earth terms are searched for and the inclusion of pulsar terms is critical to remove such a bias; (iii) in the case of strong detections (with signal-to-noise ratio $\gtrsim$ 30), it may be possible to improve pulsar distance estimation through GW measurements.

12 pages, 9 figures, typos corrected. To match the published version. Code implementing this method is available at the PPTA Wiki page

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Ephemeris Errors and the Gravitational Wave Signal: Harmonic Mode Coupling in Pulsar Timing Array Searches
• Statistical Analyses for NANOGrav 5-year Timing Residuals
• Probing the properties of the pulsar wind via studying the dispersive effects in the pulses from the pulsar companion in a double neutron-star binary system