English

The Role of FAST in Pulsar Timing Arrays

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2014-07-03 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will become one of the world-leading telescopes for pulsar timing array (PTA) research. The primary goals for PTAs are to detect (and subsequently study) ultra-low-frequency gravitational waves, to develop a pulsar-based time standard and to improve solar system planetary ephemerides. FAST will have the sensitivity to observe known pulsars with significantly improved signal-to-noise ratios and will discover a large number of currently unknown pulsars. We describe how FAST will contribute to PTA research and show that jitter- and timing-noise will be the limiting noise processes for FAST data sets. Jitter noise will limit the timing precision achievable over data spans of a few years while timing noise will limit the precision achievable over many years.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.0435,
  title  = {The Role of FAST in Pulsar Timing Arrays},
  author = {G. Hobbs and S. Dai and R. N. Manchester and R. M. Shannon and M. Kerr and K. J. Lee and R. Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.0435},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

To be published in a special issue on FAST in RAA