Limits on the stochastic gravitational wave background from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves

Demorest, P. B., Ferdman, R. D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2223-1235, Gonzalez, M. E., Nice, D., Ransom, S., Stairs, I. H., Arzoumanian, Z., Brazier, A., Burke-Spolaor, S., Chamberlin, S. J., Cordes, J. M., Ellis, J., Finn, L. S., Freire, P., Giampanis, S., Jenet, F., Kaspi, V. M., Lazio, J., Lommen, A. N., McLaughlin, M., Palliyaguru, N., Perrodin, D., Shannon, R. M., Siemens, X., Stinebring, D., Swiggum, J. and Zhu, W. W. (2013) Limits on the stochastic gravitational wave background from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves. Astrophysical Journal, 762 (2). ISSN 0004-637X

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Abstract

We present an analysis of high-precision pulsar timing data taken as part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) project. We have observed 17 pulsars for a span of roughly five years using the Green Bank and Arecibo radio telescopes. We analyze these data using standard pulsar timing models, with the addition of time-variable dispersion measure and frequency-variable pulse shape terms. Sub-microsecond timing residuals are obtained in nearly all cases, and the best rms timing residuals in this set are similar to 30-50 ns. We present methods for analyzing post-fit timing residuals for the presence of a gravitational wave signal with a specified spectral shape. These optimally take into account the timing fluctuation power removed by the model fit, and can be applied to either data from a single pulsar, or to a set of pulsars to detect a correlated signal. We apply these methods to our data set to set an upper limit on the strength of the nHz-frequency stochastic supermassive black hole gravitational wave background of h(c)(1 yr(-1)) <7 x 10(-15) (95%). This result is dominated by the timing of the two best pulsars in the set, PSRs J1713+0747 and J1909-3744.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	gravitational waves,data analysis methods,general pulsars,individual pulsars (j0030+0451, j0613-0200, j1012+5307, j1455-3330, j1600-3053, j1640+2224, j1643-1224, j1713+0747, j1744-1134, j1853+1308, b1855+09, j1909-3744, j1910+1256, j1918-0642, b1953+29, j2145-0750, j2317+1439)
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2018 14:30
Last Modified:	21 Jun 2023 09:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/67564
DOI:	10.1088/0004-637X/762/2/94

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