Detecting Gravitational Wave Anisotropies from Supermassive Black Hole Binaries

TL;DR

This paper assesses the likelihood of detecting gravitational wave anisotropies from supermassive black hole binaries with current and future pulsar timing arrays, providing insights into the SMBHB population and the origin of the gravitational wave background.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate the detection probability of SMBHB-induced anisotropies in the gravitational wave background using PTA data, and evaluates current and future prospects.

Findings

Current PTAs have a 2-11% chance to detect SMBHB anisotropies.

Future PTAs like IPTA DR3 increase detection probability to 4-28%.

Certain SMBHB populations are more likely to produce detectable anisotropies.

Abstract

Several Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) collaborations have recently found evidence for a gravitational wave background (GWB) permeating our galaxy. The origin of this background is still unknown. Indeed, while the gravitational wave emission from inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHB) is the primary candidate for its origin, several cosmological sources have also been proposed. One distinctive feature of SMBHB-generated backgrounds is the presence of GWB anisotropies stemming from the binaries distribution in the local Universe. However, none of the anisotropy searches performed to date reported a detection. In this work, we show that the lack of anisotropy detection is not currently in tension with a SMBHB origin of the background. We accomplish this by calculating the anisotropy detection probability of present and future PTAs. We find that a PTA with the noise characteristics of the NANOGrav 15-year data set had only a $~2\%-11\%$ probability of detecting SMBHB-generated anisotropies, depending on the properties of the SMBHB population. However, we estimate that for the IPTA DR3 data set these probabilities will increase to $~4\%-28\%$, putting more pressure on the SMBHB interpretation in case of a null detection. We also identify SMBHB populations that are more likely to produce detectable levels of anisotropies. This information could be used together with the spectral properties of the GWB to characterize the SMBHB population.