Resolving Individual Signals in the Presence of Stochastic Background in Future Pulsar Timing Arrays

Abstract

Recent pulsar timing array (PTA) observations have reported evidence of a gravitational wave background (GWB). If supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are indeed the primary source of this signal, future PTA observations, such as those from the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), are expected to simultaneously capture multiple continuous gravitational waves (CGWs) emitted by bright individual SMBH binaries alongside a gravitational wave background (GWB). To address this anticipated scenario in the SKA era, we revisit the F-statistic, a detection method for single source signals in PTA datasets, and introduce a new modeling that accounts for unresolved GWs as a stochastic GWB. Here, we applied this improved F-statistic to the mock datasets that include both CGW and GWB and evaluated how accurately F-statistic can identify the parameters of CGW. As a result, we demonstrate that our approach can successfully improve the estimation of the sky position and the amplitude of CGW, particularly when the GWB is dominant over white noise. This work serves as an initial step toward developing an efficient and robust algorithm based on the F-statistic for future PTA observations.

13 pages, 9 figures, accepted in MNRAS

References in corpus (14)

• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background
• Search for an isotropic gravitational-wave background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• Searching for the nano-Hertz stochastic gravitational wave background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I
• The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array III. Search for gravitational wave signals
• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Search for Signals from New Physics
• The stochastic gravitational-wave background from massive black hole binary systems: implications for observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays
• TEMPO2, a new pulsar timing package. III: Gravitational wave simulation
• The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release
• The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: The first search for gravitational waves with the MeerKAT radio telescope
• Detection and localization of continuous gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays: the role of pulsar terms
• How to Detect an Astrophysical Nanohertz Gravitational-Wave Background
• Separating deterministic and stochastic gravitational wave signals in realistic pulsar timing array datasets
• Probing the mass relation between supermassive black holes and dark matter halos at high redshifts by gravitational wave experiments

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Realistic assessment of a single gravitational wave source localization taking into account precise pulsar distances with pulsar timing arrays
• Graph-based Summary Statistics for Revealing the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background in Pulsar Timing Arrays