The NANOGrav 11-Year Data Set: Evolution of Gravitational Wave Background Statistics.
2019
An ensemble of inspiraling
supermassive black holebinaries should produce a stochastic background of
very low frequency
gravitational waves. This stochastic background is predicted to be a power law, with a
spectral indexof -3/2, and it should be detectable by a network of precisely timed
millisecond pulsars, widely distributed on the sky. This paper reports a new "time slicing" analysis of the 11-year data release from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for
Gravitational Waves(NANOGrav) using 34
millisecond pulsars. Methods to flag potential "false positive" signatures are developed, including techniques to identify responsible
pulsars. Mitigation strategies are then presented. We demonstrate how an incorrect noise model can lead to spurious signals, and show how independently modeling noise across 30 Fourier components, spanning NANOGrav's frequency range, effectively diagnoses and absorbs the excess power in
gravitational-wavesearches. This results in a nominal, and expected, progression of our
gravitational-wavestatistics. Additionally we show that the first
interstellar mediumevent in PSR J1713+0747 pollutes the common red noise process with low-
spectral indexnoise, and use a tailored noise model to remove these effects.
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