LIMITS ON THE STOCHASTIC GRAVITATIONAL WAVE BACKGROUND FROM THE NORTH AMERICAN NANOHERTZ OBSERVATORY FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

作者：Demorest P B^*; Ferdman R D; 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; Zhu W W

来源：Astrophysical Journal, 2013, 762(2): 94.

DOI：10.1088/0004-637X/762/2/94

• gravitational waves
• methods: data analysis
• pulsars: general
• pulsars: individual (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)

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

• 出版日期2013-1-10
• 单位McGill