Searching for continuous Gravitational Waves in the second data release of the International Pulsar Timing Array

Abstract

The International Pulsar Timing Array 2nd data release is the combination of datasets from worldwide collaborations. In this study, we search for continuous waves: gravitational wave signals produced by individual supermassive black hole binaries in the local universe. We consider binaries on circular orbits and neglect the evolution of orbital frequency over the observational span. We find no evidence for such signals and set sky averaged 95% upper limits on their amplitude h 95 . The most sensitive frequency is 10nHz with h 95 = 9.1 10-15 . We achieved the best upper limit to date at low and high frequencies of the PTA band thanks to improved effective cadence of observations. In our analysis, we have taken into account the recently discovered common red noise process, which has an impact at low frequencies. We also find that the peculiar noise features present in some pulsars data must be taken into account to reduce the false alarm. We show that using custom noise models is essential in searching for continuous gravitational wave signals and setting the upper limit.

References in corpus (16)

• Tempo2, a new pulsar timing package. II: The timing model and precision estimates
• The stochastic gravitational-wave background from massive black hole binary systems: implications for observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The International Pulsar Timing Array second data release: Search for an isotropic Gravitational Wave Background
• On the evidence for a common-spectrum process in the search for the nanohertz gravitational-wave background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• Common-red-signal analysis with 24-yr high-precision timing of the European Pulsar Timing Array: Inferences in the stochastic gravitational-wave background search
• Gravitational waves from resolvable massive black hole binary systems and observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays
• Measuring the parameters of massive black hole binary systems with Pulsar Timing Array observations of gravitational waves
• An all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array data set
• NANOGrav Limits on Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Circular Orbits
• New advances in the Gaussian-process approach to pulsar-timing data analysis
• Identifying and mitigating noise sources in precision pulsar timing data sets
• The NANOGrav Nine-Year Data Set: Excess Noise in Millisecond Pulsar Arrival Times
• Pulsar Timing Array Observations of Massive Black Hole Binaries
• Quality over Quantity: Optimizing pulsar timing array analysis for stochastic and continuous gravitational wave signals
• Principles of Gravitational-Wave Detection with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Status Report on Global Pulsar-Timing-Array Efforts to Detect Gravitational Waves
• The Chinese Pulsar Timing Array data release I. Single pulsar noise analysis
• Realistic assessment of a single gravitational wave source localization taking into account precise pulsar distances with pulsar timing arrays
• Searching for continuous gravitational waves in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Data Release 3
• Finite Populations & Finite Time: The Non-Gaussianity of a Gravitational Wave Background
• Constraints on High-Frequency Gravitational Waves from Graviton-Photon Conversion in the M87 Galaxy
• Extending the micro-Hertz detection horizons via orbital resonance effect for geocentric gravitational wave antennas
• Upper limits on microhertz gravitational waves from supermassive black-hole binaries using PSR J1909-3744 data from the second IPTA data release