Gravitational Wave Searches with Pulsar Timing Arrays. I: Cancellation of Clock and Ephemeris Noises

Abstract

We propose a data processing technique to cancel monopole and dipole noise sources (such as clock and ephemeris noises respectively) in pulsar timing array searches for gravitational radiation. These noises are the dominant sources of correlated timing fluctuations in the lower-part ($\approx 10^{-9}-10^{-8}$ Hz) of the gravitational wave band accessible by pulsar timing experiments. After deriving the expressions that reconstruct these noises from the timing data, we estimate the gravitational wave sensitivity of our proposed processing technique to single-source signals to be at least one order of magnitude higher than that achievable by directly processing the timing data from an equal-size array. Since arrays can generate pairs of clock and ephemeris-free timing combinations that are no longer affected by correlated noises, we implement with them the cross-correlation statistic to search for an isotropic stochastic gravitational wave background. We find the resulting optimal signal-to-noise ratio to be more than one order of magnitude larger than that obtainable by correlating pairs of timing data from arrays of equal size.

Article submitted to Physical Review D. It is 26 pages long and includes 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Accurate characterization of the stochastic gravitational-wave background with pulsar timing arrays by likelihood reweighting
• Ephemeris Errors and the Gravitational Wave Signal: Harmonic Mode Coupling in Pulsar Timing Array Searches
• Status Report on Global Pulsar-Timing-Array Efforts to Detect Gravitational Waves
• Posterior predictive checking for gravitational-wave detection with pulsar timing arrays: II. Posterior predictive distributions and pseudo Bayes factors