Cosmic Variance in Anisotropy Searches at Pulsar Timing Arrays
Recent pulsar timing array (PTA) analyses show evidence for a gravitational wave background (GWB) with angular correlations consistent with the Hellings-Downs curve. Anisotropies are a key discriminator of the origin of this GWB, as they are expected to be at 1%─20% for astrophysical sources, but suppressed for cosmological GWBs. However, contrary to gravitational wave detectors at higher frequencies, PTAs only take a few independent measurements of a GWB and consequently are highly sensitive to cosmic variance, which induces apparent anisotropies in individual realizations of an isotropic GWB. We demonstrate explicitly that statistical inference nevertheless remains robust, i.e., measurements are consistent with the underlying assumption of isotropy. This confirms that searches for anisotropies will be able to robustly discriminate astrophysical from cosmological GWBs. To this end, we demonstrate that the maximum multipole constrained by a PTA dataset scales linearly with the number of pulsars <inline-formula><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mo>ℓ</mml:mo></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mi>max</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub><mml:mo>∼</mml:mo><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>N</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mi>p</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:mrow></mml:math></inline-formula>.
展开 ▾脉冲星计时阵列各向异性搜索中的宇宙方差 · 本文证明脉冲星计时阵列对引力波背景的各向异性测量虽受宇宙方差影响,但统计推断仍稳健,且可约束的最大多极与脉冲星数量线性相关。
预印本 2025-08-28 · 刊出 2026-08-06 · 收录 2026-08-20