http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11454
Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) experiments are expected to be sensitive to gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by individual supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) inspiralling along eccentric orbits. We compare the computational cost of different methods of computing the PTA signals induced by relativistic eccentric SMBHBs, namely approximate analytic expressions, Fourier series expansion, post-circular expansion, and numerical integration. We show that the fastest method for evaluating PTA signals is by using the approximate analytic expressions, providing up to a $\sim$50 times improvement in computational performance over the alternative methods. We investigate the accuracy of the approximate analytic expressions by employing a mismatch metric valid for PTA signals. We show that this method is accurate within the region of the binary parameter space that is of interest to PTA experiments. We introduce a spline-based method for further accelerating the PTA signal evaluations for narrow-band PTA datasets. These results are crucial for searching for eccentric SMBHBs in large PTA datasets. We have implemented these results in the GWecc package and can be readily accessed from the popular ENTERPRISE package to search for such signals in PTA datasets.
A. Susobhanan
Fri, 21 Oct 22
6/76
Comments: Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravity