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Realistic sensitivity curves for pulsar timing arrays

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arxiv 1907.04341 v1 pith:5UP2UI3G submitted 2019-07-09 gr-qc astro-ph.IM

classification gr-qcastro-ph.IM
keywords curvessensitivitypulsarrealistictimingarrayexactnoise
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We construct realistic sensitivity curves for pulsar timing array searches for gravitational waves, incorporating both red and white noise contributions to individual pulsar noise spectra, as well as the effect of fitting to a pulsar timing model. We demonstrate the method on both simulated pulsars and a realistic array consisting of a subset of NANOGrav pulsars used in recent analyses. A comparison between the results presented here and exact sensitivity curves shows agreement to tens of percent. The resulting sensitivity curves can be used to assess the detectability of predicted gravitational-wave signals in the nanohertz frequency band in a fraction of the time that it would take to compute the exact sensitivity curves.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Beyond diagonal approximations: improved covariance modeling for pulsar timing array data analysis

    astro-ph.IM 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A new FFT-and-interpolation covariance method for pulsar timing arrays avoids the biased parameters produced by the standard diagonal Fourier-space approximation.

  2. From new physics to a running power law and back again: Minimal refitting techniques for the reconstruction of the gravitational-wave background signal in pulsar timing array data

    gr-qc 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new refitting technique maps any gravitational-wave background spectrum onto a running-power-law reference model via sensitivity-weighted chi-squared minimization, and uses the pullback of the reference posterior to...

  3. Cosmic Variance in Anisotropy Searches at Pulsar Timing Arrays

    astro-ph.CO 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Cosmic variance does not create false anisotropy detections in pulsar timing array searches when the correct likelihood is used, and the maximum resolvable multipole scales as the number of pulsars rather than its squ...

  4. \texttt{GWBird}: a toolkit for the characterization of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background for Ground, Space, and Pulsar Timing Array detectors

    astro-ph.IM 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A new, unified Python package computes overlap reduction functions, power-law integrated sensitivity curves, and angular sensitivity curves for ground, space, and pulsar timing array detectors across all gravitational...

  5. The SKAO Pulsar Timing Array

    astro-ph.IM 2026-07 accept novelty 3.5 of 10

    An SKAO PTA with ~174 millisecond pulsars can dominate nanohertz GW sensitivity within four years and enable continuous-wave detections plus anisotropy maps of the gravitational-wave background.

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