Resolvable Supermassive Black Hole Binaries are promising sources for Pulsar Timing Array based gravitational wave searches. Search algorithms for such targets must contend with the large number of so-called pulsar phase parameters in the joint log-likelihood function of the data. We compare the localization accuracy for two approaches: Maximization over the pulsar phase parameters (MaxPhase) against marginalization over them (AvPhase). Using simulated data from a pulsar timing array with 17 pulsars, we find that for weak and moderately strong signals, AvPhase outperforms MaxPhase significantly, while they perform comparably for strong signals.
@article{arxiv.1704.05784,
title = {Continuous gravitational wave searches with pulsar timing arrays: Maximization versus marginalization over pulsar phase parameters},
author = {Yan Wang and Soumya D. Mohanty and Yi-Qian Qian},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.05784},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
2 pages, 1 figure; to be published in the proceedings of the LISA symposium XI (University of Zurich, 2016)