Continuous gravitational wave searches with pulsar timing arrays: Maximization versus marginalization over pulsar phase parameters

Abstract

Resolvable Supermassive Black Hole Binaries are promising sources for Pulsar Timing Array based gravitational wave searches. Search algorithms for such targets must contend with the large number of so-called pulsar phase parameters in the joint log-likelihood function of the data. We compare the localization accuracy for two approaches: Maximization over the pulsar phase parameters (MaxPhase) against marginalization over them (AvPhase). Using simulated data from a pulsar timing array with 17 pulsars, we find that for weak and moderately strong signals, AvPhase outperforms MaxPhase significantly, while they perform comparably for strong signals.

arXiv comment2 pages, 1 figure; to be published in the proceedings of the LISA symposium XI (University of Zurich, 2016)

References in corpus (1)

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

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