Pulsar timing arrays: the promise of gravitational wave detection.
@article{Lommen2015PulsarTA,
title={Pulsar timing arrays: the promise of gravitational wave detection.},
author={A. N. Lommen},
journal={Reports on progress in physics. Physical Society},
year={2015},
volume={78 12},
pages={
124901
}
}We describe the history, methods, tools, and challenges of using pulsars to detect gravitational waves. Pulsars act as celestial clocks detecting gravitational perturbations in space-time at wavelengths of light-years. The field is poised to make its first detection of nanohertz gravitational waves in the next 10 years. Controversies remain over how far we can reduce the noise in the pulsars, how many pulsars should be in the array, what kind of source we will detect first, and how we can best…
36 Citations
Proving the short-wavelength approximation in Pulsar Timing Array gravitational-wave background searches
- PhysicsJournal of Physics Communications
- 2018
A low-frequency gravitational-wave background (GWB) from the cosmic merger history of supermassive black holes is expected to be detected in the next few years by pulsar timing arrays. A GWB induces…
Catching Gravitational Waves With a Galaxy-Sized Net of Pulsars
- PhysicsFront. Young Minds.
- 2019
Until recently, the only way to observe the Universe was from light received by telescopes. But we are now able to measure gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of the Universe…
Continuous gravitational wave searches with pulsar timing arrays: Maximization versus marginalization over pulsar phase parameters
- Physics
- 2017
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…
Pulsar-timing arrays, astrometry, and gravitational waves
- PhysicsPhysical Review D
- 2019
We discuss the theory of pulsar-timing and astrometry probes of a stochastic gravitational-wave background with a recently developed "total-angular-momentum" (TAM) formalism for cosmological…
Review of pulsar timing array for gravitational wave research
- Physics
- 2020
Ongoing research on pulsar timing array (PTA) to detect gravitational radiation is reviewed. Here, we discuss the use of millisecond pulsars as a gravitational wave detector, the sources of…
Harmonic space analysis of pulsar timing array redshift maps
- Physics
- 2016
In this paper, we propose a new framework for treating the angular information in the pulsar timing array response to a gravitational wave background based on standard cosmic microwave background…
Advantages of Including Globular Cluster Millisecond Pulsars in Pulsar Timing Arrays
- Physics
- 2021
Even though Pulsar Timing Arrays already have the potential to detect the gravitational wave background by finding a quadrupole correlation in the timing residuals, this goal has not yet been…
Geodesic noise and gravitational wave observations by pulsar timing arrays
- PhysicsPhysics Letters B
- 2021
Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Backgrounds: Current Detection Efforts and Future Prospects
- PhysicsGalaxies
- 2022
The collection of individually resolvable gravitational wave (GW) events makes up a tiny fraction of all GW signals that reach our detectors, while most lie below the confusion limit and are…
The search for statistical anisotropy in the gravitational-wave background with pulsar timing arrays
- PhysicsThe Open Journal of Astrophysics
- 2019
Pulsar-timing arrays (PTAs) are seeking gravitational waves from supermassive-black-hole binaries, and there are prospects to complement these searches with stellar-astrometry measurements. Theorists…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 107 REFERENCES
Pulsar Timing Arrays: No longer a Blunt Instrument for Gravitational Wave Detection
- Physics
- 2011
Pulsar timing now has a rich history in placing limits on the stochastic background of gravitational waves, and we plan soon to reach the sensitivity where we can detect, not just place limits on,…
OPTIMIZING PULSAR TIMING ARRAYS TO MAXIMIZE GRAVITATIONAL WAVE SINGLE-SOURCE DETECTION: A FIRST CUT
- Physics
- 2011
Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) use high accuracy timing of a collection of low timing noise pulsars to search for gravitational waves (GWs) in the microhertz to nanohertz frequency band. The sensitivity…
DETECTING GRAVITATIONAL WAVE MEMORY WITH PULSAR TIMING
- Physics
- 2012
We compare the detectability of gravitational bursts passing through the solar system with those passing near each millisecond pulsar in an N-pulsar timing array. The sensitivity to Earth-passing…
Gravitational wave astronomy of single sources with a pulsar timing array
- Physics
- 2011
The stability of radio millisecond pulsars as celestial clocks allows for the possibility to detect and study the properties of gravitational waves (GWs) when the received pulses are timed jointly in…
The sensitivity of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array to individual sources of gravitational waves
- Physics
- 2010
ABSTRACT We present the sensitivity of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array to gravitational wavesemitted by individual super-massive black-hole binary systems in the early phases ofcoalescing at the cores…
DETECTION, LOCALIZATION, AND CHARACTERIZATION OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE BURSTS IN A PULSAR TIMING ARRAY
- Physics, Geology
- 2010
Efforts to detect gravitational waves by timing an array of pulsars have traditionally focused on stationary gravitational waves, e.g., stochastic or periodic signals. Gravitational wave…
Gravitational-Wave Memory and Pulsar Timing Arrays
- Physics
- 2010
Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are designed to detect gravitational waves with periods from several months to several years, e.g. those produced by wide supermassive black-hole binaries in the centers…
Timing stability of millisecond pulsars and prospects for gravitational-wave detection
- Physics, Geology
- 2009
Analysis of high-precision timing observations of an array of " 20 millisecond pulsars (a socalled “timing array”) may ultimately result in the detection of a stochastic gravitational-wave…
Observing the dynamics of supermassive black hole binaries with pulsar timing arrays.
- PhysicsPhysical review letters
- 2012
It is shown that the detection of gravitational radiation from individually resolvable supermassive black hole binary systems can yield direct information about the masses and spins of the black holes, provided that the gravitational-wave-induced timing fluctuations both at the pulsar and at Earth are detected.
On measuring the gravitational-wave background using Pulsar Timing Arrays
- Physics
- 2009
Long-term precise timing of Galactic millisecond pulsars holds great promise for measuring the long-period (months-to-years) astrophysical gravitational waves. Several gravitational-wave…






