Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

Pulsar timing array sensitivity to anisotropies in the gravitational wave background

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2407.14460 v2 pith:JFI7AY6H submitted 2024-07-19 astro-ph.CO astro-ph.HEgr-qc

classification astro-ph.COastro-ph.HEgr-qc
keywords pulsartiminganisotropiesbackgroundgravitationalwavearrayarrays
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) observations have recently gathered substantial evidence for the existence of a gravitational wave background in the nHz frequency band. Searching for anisotropies in this signal is key to determining its origin, and in particular to distinguish possible astrophysical from cosmological sources. In this work, we assess the sensitivity of current and future pulsar timing arrays to such anisotropies using the full covariance matrix of pulsar timing delays. While current day pulsar timing arrays can only set mildly informative constraints on the dipole and quadrupole, we show that percent level accuracy for several low multipoles can be achieved in the near future. Moreover, we demonstrate that anisotropies in the gravitational wave background and the Hellings-Downs angular correlation, indicating the presence of GWs, are approximately uncorrelated, and can hence be reconstructed independently. These results can be reproduced with \href{https://github.com/Mauropieroni/fastPTA}{\texttt{fastPTA}}, a publicly available Python code to forecast the constraining power of PTA configurations.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

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. 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.

Pith tools