Related papers: Identifying and mitigating noise sources in precis…
Gravitational waves with frequencies below 1~nHz are notoriously difficult to detect. With periods exceeding current experimental lifetimes, they induce slow drifts in observables rather than periodic correlations. Observables with…
We present the sensitivity of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array to gravitational waves emitted by individual super-massive black-hole binary systems in the early phases of coalescing at the cores of merged galaxies. Our analysis includes a…
The sensitivity of ongoing searches for gravitational wave (GW) sources in the ultra-low frequency regime ($10^{-9}$ Hz to $10^{-7}$ Hz) using Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) will continue to increase in the future as more well-timed pulsars…
Pulsar timing experiments are reaching sufficient sensitivity to detect a postulated stochastic gravitational wave background generated by merging supermassive black hole systems in the cores of galaxies. We describe the techniques behind…
We have carried out a sensitive radio pulsar survey along the northern Galactic plane ($50^{\circ} < l < 60^{\circ}$ and $|b| \lapp 2^{\circ}$) using the Parkes 20-cm multibeam system. We observed each position for 70-min on two separate…
The maximum frequency of gravitational waves (GWs) detectable with traditional pulsar timing methods is set by the Nyquist frequency ($f_{\rm{Ny}}$) of the observation. Beyond this frequency, GWs leave no temporal-correlated signals;…
The direct detection of gravitational waves is a major goal of current astrophysics. We provide details of a new method for detecting a stochastic background of gravitational waves using pulsar timing data. Our results show that regular…
The aims of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) project are to 1) make a direct detection of gravitational waves, 2) improve the solar system planetary ephemeris and 3) develop a pulsar-based time scale. In this article we describe the…
Efforts are underway to use high-precision timing of pulsars in order to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. A limit to this technique is the timing noise generated by dispersion in the plasma along the line of sight to the pulsar,…
It is widely accepted that dark matter contributes about a quarter of the critical mass-energy density in our Universe. The nature of dark matter is currently unknown, with the mass of possible constituents spanning nearly one hundred…
We analyse the stochastic properties of the 49 pulsars that comprise the first International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) data release. We use Bayesian methodology, performing model selection to determine the optimal description of the…
Pulsars are the most stable macroscopic clocks found in nature. Spinning with periods as short as a few milliseconds, their stability can supersede that of the best atomic clocks on Earth over timescales of a few years. Stable clocks are…
Individual supermassive black hole binaries in non-circular orbits are possible nanohertz gravitational wave sources for the rapidly maturing Pulsar Timing Array experiments. We develop an accurate and efficient approach to compute Pulsar…
We present a robust approach to incorporating models for the time-variable broadening of the pulse profile due to scattering in the ionized interstellar medium into profile-domain pulsar timing analysis. We use this approach to…
The stochastic gravitational wave background for pulsar timing arrays is often modeled by a Gaussian ensemble which is isotropic and unpolarized. However, the Universe has a discrete set of polarized gravitational wave sources at specific…
We analyze timing noise from five years of Arecibo and Green Bank observations of the seventeen millisecond pulsars of the North-American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) pulsar timing array. The weighted…
We assess the detectability of a nanohertz gravitational wave (GW) background with respect to additive red and white noise in the timing of millisecond pulsars. We develop detection criteria based on the cross-correlation function summed…
Three pulsar timing arrays are now producing high quality data sets. As reviewed in this paper, these data sets are been processed to 1) develop a pulsar-based time standard, 2) search for errors in the solar system planetary ephemeris and…
The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey is a sensitive survey of a strip along the Galactic plane with |b|<5 deg and l=260 deg to l=50 deg. It uses a 13-beam receiver on the 64-m Parkes radio telescope, receiving two polarisations per beam over…
A number of pulsar timing arrays have recently reported preliminary evidence for the existence of a nanohertz frequency gravitational-wave background. These analyses rely on detailed noise analyses, which are inherently complex due to the…