Including Millisecond Pulsars inside the Core of Globular Clusters in Pulsar Timing Arrays

TL;DR

This paper explores including millisecond pulsars within globular cluster cores in pulsar timing arrays, showing their correlated residuals can enhance gravitational wave detection capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of using closely located pulsars in globular clusters for improved gravitational wave detection in pulsar timing arrays.

Findings

Strong correlation in timing residuals of cluster core pulsars can indicate gravitational waves.

Simulations based on Terzan 5 suggest potential for enhanced GW detection.

Correlated residuals could complement standard cross-correlation methods.

Abstract

We suggest the possibility of including millisecond pulsars inside the core of globular clusters in pulsar timing array experiments. Since they are very close to each other, their gravitational wave induced timing residuals are expected to be almost the same, because both the Earth and the pulsar terms are correlated. We simulate the expected timing residuals, due to the gravitational wave signal emitted by a uniform supermassive black-hole binary population, on the millisecond pulsars inside a globular cluster core. In this respect, Terzan 5 has been adopted as a globular cluster prototype and, in our simulations, we adopted similar distance, core radius, and number of millisecond pulsars contained in it. Our results show that the presence of a strong correlation between the timing residuals of the globular cluster core millisecond pulsars can provide a remarkable gravitational wave signature. This result can be therefore exploited for the detection of gravitational waves through pulsar timing, especially in conjunction with the standard cross-correlation search carried out by the pulsar timing array collaborations.