Rapid Construction of Joint Pulsar Timing Array Datasets: The Lite Method
Abstract
The International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA)'s second data release (IPTA DR2) combines decades of observations of 65 millisecond pulsars from 7 radio telescopes. IPTA datasets should be the most sensitive datasets to nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs), but take years to assemble, often excluding valuable recent data. To address this, we introduce the IPTA "Lite" analysis, where a Figure of Merit is used to select an optimal PTA dataset to analyze for each pulsar, enabling immediate access to new data and preliminary results prior to full combination. We test the capabilities of the Lite analysis using IPTA DR2, finding that "DR2 Lite" can be used to detect the common red noise process with an amplitude of at . This amplitude is slightly large in comparison to the combined analysis, and likely biased high as DR2 Lite is more sensitive to systematic errors from individual pulsars than the full dataset. Furthermore, although there is no strong evidence for Hellings-Downs correlations in IPTA DR2, we still find the full dataset is better at resolving Hellings-Downs correlations than DR2 Lite. Alongside the Lite analysis, we also find that analyzing a subset of pulsars from IPTA DR2, available at a hypothetical "early" stage of combination (EDR2), yields equally competitive results as the full dataset. Looking ahead, the Lite method will enable rapid synthesis of the latest PTA data, offering preliminary GW constraints before the superior full dataset combinations are available.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.20949,
title = {Rapid Construction of Joint Pulsar Timing Array Datasets: The Lite Method},
author = {Bjorn Larsen and Chiara M. F. Mingarelli and Paul T. Baker and Jeffrey S. Hazboun and Siyuan Chen and Levi Schult and Stephen R. Taylor and Joseph Simon and John Antoniadis and Jeremy Baier and R. Nicolaos Caballero and Aurélien Chalumeau and Zu-Cheng Chen and Ismael Cognard and Debabrata Deb and Valentina Di Marco and Timothy Dolch and Innocent O. Eya and Elizabeth C. Ferrara and Kyle A. Gersbach and Deborah C. Good and Huanchen Hu and Agastya Kapur and Shubham Kala and Michael Kramer and Michael T. Lam and William G. Lamb and T. Joseph W. Lazio and Kuo Liu and Yang Liu and Maura McLaughlin and David J. Nice and Benetge B. P. Perera and Antoine Petiteau and Scott M. Ransom and Daniel J. Reardon and Christopher J. Russell and Golam M. Shaifullah and Lorenzo Speri and Aman Srivastava and Gilles Theureau and Jingbo Wang and Jun Wang and Lei Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.20949},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
MNRAS accepted version