Searching for the Nano-Hertz Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Abstract Observing and timing a group of millisecond pulsars with high rotational stability enables the direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs). The search for the Hellings–Downs (HD) correlation curve is also presented, where some evidence for the HD correlation has been found that a 4.6 σ statistical significance is achieved using the discrete frequency method around the frequency of 14 nHz.

🔑 Key Findings

• The GW signals can be identified from the spatial correlations encoded in the times-of-arrival of widely spaced pulsar-pairs.
• The Chinese Pulsar Timing Array (CPTA) is a collaboration aiming at the direct GW detection with observations carried out using Chinese radio telescopes.
• This short article serves as a “table of contents” for a forthcoming series of papers related to the CPTA Data Release 1 (CPTA DR1) which uses observations from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope.

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