Pulsar timing noise and the minimum observation time to detect gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays

Abstract

The sensitivity of pulsar timing arrays to gravitational waves is, at some level, limited by timing noise. Red timing noise – the stochastic wandering of pulse arrival times with a red spectrum – is prevalent in slow-spinning pulsars and has been identified in many millisecond pulsars. Phenomenological models of timing noise, such as from superfluid turbulence, suggest that the timing noise spectrum plateaus below some critical frequency, fc, potentially aiding the hunt for gravitational waves. We examine this effect for individual pulsars by calculating minimum observation times, Tmin(fc), over which the gravitational wave signal becomes larger than the timing noise plateau. We do this in t..