Optimizing Pulsar Timing Arrays Observations for Detection and Characterization of Low-Frequency Gravitational Wave Sources

TL;DR

This paper discusses strategies to optimize pulsar timing arrays for detecting low-frequency gravitational waves, emphasizing the importance of high-precision pulsar observations and robust noise modeling to enhance sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces a method to evaluate PTA sensitivity to different gravitational-wave sources and applies it to NANOGrav data, highlighting the importance of pulsar selection and noise characterization.

Findings

All pulsars significantly contribute to stochastic background detection over decades.

Sensitivity to single sources varies with pulsar contribution, depending on source location.

Robust noise parameter estimation is crucial for accurate sensitivity assessments.

Abstract

Observations of low-frequency gravitational waves will require the highest possible timing precision from an array of the most spin-stable pulsars. We can improve the sensitivity of a pulsar timing array (PTA) to different gravitational-wave sources by observing pulsars with low timing noise over years to decades and distributed across the sky. We discuss observing strategies for a PTA focused on a stochastic gravitational-wave background such as from unresolved supermassive black hole binaries as well as focused on single continuous-wave sources. First we describe the method to calculate a PTA's sensitivity to different gravitational-wave-source classes. We then apply our method to the 45 pulsars presented in the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) 11-year data set. For expected amplitudes of the stochastic background, we find that all pulsars contribute significantly over the timescale of decades; the exception is for very pessimistic values of the stochastic background amplitude. For individual single sources, we find that a number of pulsars contribute to the sensitivity of a given source but that which pulsars contribute are different depending on the source, or versus an all-sky metric. Our results seem robust to the presence of temporally-correlated red noise in pulsar arrival times. It is critical to obtain more robust pulsar-noise parameters as they heavily affect our results. Our results show that it is also imperative to locate and time as many high-precision pulsars as possible, as quickly as possible, to maximize the sensitivity of next-generation PTA detectors.