Pulsar Timing Arrays

TL;DR

Pulsar Timing Arrays utilize ensembles of radio pulsars to detect low-frequency gravitational waves, with recent advancements and ongoing challenges discussed.

Contribution

This review summarizes the principles, current status, and challenges of PTA-based gravitational wave detection, highlighting recent progress.

Findings

PTAs have significantly advanced low-frequency gravitational wave detection.

Current PTAs are operational and actively constraining gravitational wave backgrounds.

Main challenges include noise mitigation and increasing pulsar arrays.

Abstract

In the last decade, the use of an ensemble of radio pulsars to constrain the characteristic strain caused by a stochastic gravitational wave background has advanced the cause of detection of very low frequency gravitational waves significantly. This electromagnetic means of gravitational wave detection, called Pulsar Timing Array(PTA), is reviewed in this article. The principle of operation of PTA, the current operating PTAs and their status is presented along-with a discussion of the main challenges in the detection of gravitational waves using PTA.