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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Improving The Sensitivity Of A Pulsar Timing Array: Correcting For Interstellar Scattering Delays, Jacob E. Turner
Improving The Sensitivity Of A Pulsar Timing Array: Correcting For Interstellar Scattering Delays, Jacob E. Turner
Honors Papers
The NANOGrav collaboration aims to detect low frequency gravitational waves by measuring the arrival times of radio signals from pulsars. A confirmation of such a gravitational wave signal requires timing tens of pulsars with a precision of better than 100 nanoseconds for around 10 – 25 years. A crucial component of the success of pulsar timing relies on understanding how the interstellar medium affects timing accuracy. Current pulsar timing models account only for the large-scale dispersion delays from the ISM. As a result, the relatively small-scale propagation effects caused by scattering are partially absorbed into the dispersion delay component of …
Improving Pulsar Timing Through Interstellar Scatter Correction, Daniel Hemberger
Improving Pulsar Timing Through Interstellar Scatter Correction, Daniel Hemberger
Honors Papers
Though pulsar timing has confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, no technique has directly detected them. Jenet et al. state the requirements for the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) to make a significant detection of the stochastic gravitational wave background within five years. By employing the scintillation information in observations for each pulsar at every epoch, I believe interstellar scattering, an underestimated source of timing noise, can be corrected enough for the PPTA to meet these requirements. The improved detection threshold will help answer important questions about black hole mergers, galaxy evolution, and gravitation.