Detection of gravitational waves by pulsar timing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel pulsar timing method to detect gravitational waves by analyzing spectral components and applying two-point correlation functions, successfully identifying a gravitational wave background signature.

Contribution

Introduces a new pulsar timing approach using spectral expansion and correlation analysis to detect gravitational waves, demonstrating its effectiveness with real data.

Findings

Detected a gravitational wave background signature with high confidence

Achieved a correlation coefficient of 0.82±0.07 between observed and theoretical signals

Validated the method on multiple millisecond pulsars

Abstract

A new approach to the problem of gravitational waves detection based on simultaneous timing of several pulsars and subsequent expansion of the post-fit timing data into components of different spectral kind (with different spectral indices) is proposed. Presence of a signal caused by stochastic gravitational waves in spectral components is tested with the two-point angular correlation function as proposed in the pulsar timing array. This new approach was applied to timing data of a few millisecond pulsars and allowed to detect a signature similar to one predicted for gravitational wave background at relatively high confidence level: correlation coefficient between experimental and theoretical two-point correlations $\rho=0.82\pm 0.07$.