Directional Detection of Continuous Waves in PTAs

A continuous gravitational wave (CW) from a single source—such as a supermassive black hole binary—produces a distinct pattern of correlated timing residuals across an array of pulsars, determined by the relative sky positions of the source and the pulsars. This project uses such sky dependence to construct a matched filter detection statistic. By coherently combining the signals from multiple pulsars according to the expected pattern of correlations, the method leverages the geometry of the array to probe the sky in a directionally informed way. In this sense, it acts as a kind of directional detector, where the configuration of pulsars and assumed signal model together influence the sensitivity to different regions of the sky.