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Beyond the Hellings-Downs curve: Non-Einsteinian gravitational waves in pulsar timing array correlations

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arxiv 2310.07537 v2 pith:QRSXVSIM submitted 2023-10-11 gr-qc astro-ph.CO

classification gr-qcastro-ph.CO
keywords correlationsgravitationalsgwbbeyondnon-einsteinianwavescurvedata
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abstract

The recent astronomical milestone by the pulsar timing arrays (PTA) has revealed galactic-size gravitational waves (GW) in the form of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB), correlating the radio pulses emitted by millisecond pulsars. This draws the outstanding questions toward the origin and the nature of the SGWB; the latter is synonymous to testing how quadrupolar the inter-pulsar spatial correlation is. In this paper, we tackle the nature of the SGWB by considering correlations beyond the Hellings-Downs (HD) curve of Einstein's general relativity. We put the HD and non-Einsteinian GW correlations under scrutiny with the NANOGrav and the CPTA data, and find that both data sets allow a graviton mass $m_{\rm g} \lesssim 1.04 \times 10^{-22} \ {\rm eV}/c^2$ and subluminal traveling waves. We discuss gravitational physics scenarios beyond general relativity that could host non-Einsteinian GW correlations in the SGWB and highlight the importance of the cosmic variance inherited from the stochasticity in interpreting PTA observation.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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

  1. Testing General Relativity with Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries

    gr-qc 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

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  3. Probing Graviton Mass with MeerKAT PTA and SKA--PTA Forecasts

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  4. Do Pulsar Timing Datasets Favor Massive Gravity?

    astro-ph.CO 2025-07 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    A one-parameter massive-gravity correlation curve gives lower chi-square than the Hellings-Downs curve for current pulsar-timing data, but the parameter is fitted to the data, so the result is not a prediction.

  5. Searching beyond the fiducial stochastic gravitational wave background in pulsar timing array data using likelihood reweighting

    gr-qc 2025-04 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A two-stage likelihood reweighting method recovers the parameters and Bayes factor of an added sinusoid signal in simulated pulsar timing data, matching full Bayesian analyses while claiming about a tenfold speedup.

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