Description and Application of the Surfing Effect

TL;DR

This paper explores the surfing effect as a new technique for detecting gravitational waves using pulsar timing, clarifies its conditions, and demonstrates its potential application to specific pulsar systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the surfing effect, detailing when it occurs and how it can be used to enhance gravitational wave detection methods.

Findings

The surfing effect can be exploited to identify promising pulsars for gravitational wave searches.

Conditions for the surfing effect to occur are thoroughly characterized.

Application to PKS 2131-021 and pulsar J2145-0750 demonstrates practical relevance.

Abstract

The standard technique for very low-frequency gravitational wave detection is mainly based on searching for a specific spatial correlation in the variation of the times of arrival of the radio pulses emitted by millisecond pulsars with respect to a timing model. This spatial correlation, which in the case of the gravitational wave background must have the form described by the Hellings and Downs function, has not yet been observed. Therefore, despite the numerous hints of a common red noise in the timing residuals of many millisecond pulsars compatible with that expected for the gravitational wave background, its detection has not yet been achieved. By now, the reason is not completely clear and, from some recent works, the urgency to adopt new detection techniques, possibly complementary to the standard one, is emerging clearly. Of course, this demand also applies to the detection of continuous gravitational waves emitted by supermassive black hole binaries populating the Universe. In the latter case, important information could, in principle, emerge from the millisecond pulsars considered individually in a single-pulsar search of continuous GWs. In this context, the surfing effect can then be exploited, helping to select the best pulsars to carry out such analysis. This paper aims to clarify when the surfing effect occurs and describe it exhaustively. A possible application to the case of the supermassive black hole binary candidate PKS 2131-021 and millisecond pulsar J2145-0750 is also analyzed.