Speaker
Dr
Antoine Lassus
(Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie)
Description
We have searched for continuous gravitational wave (CGW) signals produced by individually resolvable, circular supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) in the latest EPTA dataset, which consists of ultra-precise timing data on 41 millisecond pulsars. Several algorithms have been used and depending on the adopted detection algorithm, the 95% upper limit on the sky-averaged strain amplitude lies in the range 6 x 10^-15 < A < 1.5 x 10^-14 at 5 nHz < f < 7 nHz. The most robust upper limit – obtained via a full Bayesian analysis searching simultaneously over the signal and pulsar noise on the subset of our six best pulsars – is A ~10^-14. These limits, the most stringent to date at f < 10 nHz, exclude the presence of sub-centiparsec binaries with chirp mass Mc > 10^9 solar masses out to a distance of about 25 Mpc, and with Mc > 10^10 solar masses out to a distance of about 1 Gpc (z~ 0.2).
Primary author
Dr
Antoine Lassus
(Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie)
Co-authors
Antoine Petiteau
(Universite Paris-Diderot - CNRS)
Stanislav Babak
