English

Nano-Hertz Gravitational Waves Searches with Interferometric Pulsar Timing Experiments

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2011-05-23 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We estimate the sensitivity to nano-Hertz gravitational waves of pulsar timing experiments in which two highly-stable millisecond pulsars are tracked simultaneously with two neighboring radio telescopes that are referenced to the same time-keeping subsystem (i.e. "the clock"). By taking the difference of the two time-of-arrival residual data streams we can exactly cancel the clock noise in the combined data set, thereby enhancing the sensitivity to gravitational waves. We estimate that, in the band (10910810^{-9} - 10^{-8}) Hz, this "interferometric" pulsar timing technique can potentially improve the sensitivity to gravitational radiation by almost two orders of magnitude over that of single-telescopes. Interferometric pulsar timing experiments could be performed with neighboring pairs of antennas of the forthcoming large arraying projects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.3990,
  title  = {Nano-Hertz Gravitational Waves Searches with Interferometric Pulsar Timing Experiments},
  author = {Massimo Tinto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.3990},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

Paper submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters. It is 9 pages long, and includes 2 figures