Regularizing the Pulsar Timing Array likelihood: A path towards Fourier Space

2024/12/16 by Valtolina, Serena, van Haasteren, Rutger · 2 citations
#FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.11894

Abstract

The recent announcement of evidence for a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWB) in pulsar timing array (PTA) data has piqued interest across the scientific community. A combined analysis of all currently available data holds the promise of confirming the announced evidence as a solid detection of a GWB. However, the complexity of individual pulsar noise models and the variety of modeling tools used for different types of pulsars present significant challenges for a truly unified analysis. In this work we propose a novel approach to the analysis of PTA data: first a posterior distribution over Fourier modes is produced for each pulsar individually. Then, in a global analysis of all pulsars these posterior distributions can be re-used for a GWB search, which retains all information regarding the signals of interest without the added complexity of the underlying noise models or implementation differences. This approach facilitates combining radio and gamma-ray pulsar data, while reducing the complexity of the model and of its implementations when carrying out a GWB search with PTA data.

Cited by

• Modeling Non-Gaussianities in Pulsar Timing Array data analysis using Gaussian Mixture Models
• Bayesian pulsar timing and noise analysis with Vela.jl: the wideband paradigm

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