# Realistic sensitivity curves for pulsar timing arrays

## TL;DR

This paper develops realistic sensitivity curves for pulsar timing arrays that account for noise and model fitting, enabling quicker assessment of gravitational wave detectability.

## Contribution

It introduces a method to construct approximate sensitivity curves incorporating noise and fitting effects, validated against exact calculations.

## Key findings

- Sensitivity curves agree within tens of percent with exact methods.
- The approach significantly reduces computation time.
- Useful for rapid evaluation of gravitational wave signals.

## Abstract

We construct realistic sensitivity curves for pulsar timing array searches for gravitational waves, incorporating both red and white noise contributions to individual pulsar noise spectra, as well as the effect of fitting to a pulsar timing model. We demonstrate the method on both simulated pulsars and a realistic array consisting of a subset of NANOGrav pulsars used in recent analyses. A comparison between the results presented here and exact sensitivity curves shows agreement to tens of percent. The resulting sensitivity curves can be used to assess the detectability of predicted gravitational-wave signals in the nanohertz frequency band in a fraction of the time that it would take to compute the exact sensitivity curves.