All-Sky Continuous-Wave Searches with the PPTA DR3

This all-sky analysis searched the third Parkes Pulsar Timing Array data release for continuous gravitational waves from individual supermassive black-hole binaries using complementary Bayesian and frequentist methods.

My focusFrequentist searches
DataPPTA DR3
StatusApJ, 2025

Searching across the sky

Continuous waves from a slowly evolving binary should produce a correlated signal across the pulsars in a timing array. We searched over sky position and gravitational-wave frequency, using the Fp and Fe statistics alongside Bayesian analyses.

No significant signal was found. The resulting strain upper limits reach approximately 7 × 10−15 near 10 nHz and improve on the previous PPTA search by at least a factor of four across 1–200 nHz. For binaries with chirp masses above 109 M, the search probes distances of roughly 50–200 Mpc over its most sensitive frequency range.

My contribution: I carried out the frequentist continuous-wave searches and contributed to their validation and interpretation.