Interstellar Medium Mitigation Techniques in Pulsar Timing Arrays

Abstract

Pulsar Timing Arrays use a set of millisecond pulsars in an attempt to directly detect nanohertz gravitational waves. For this purpose, high precision timing of the pulsars is essential and ultimately a precision of the order of ~100 ns is required. Propagation effects in the interstellar medium cause the radio emission from a pulsar to be dispersed and scattered, introducing time variable delays of the pulses on their way to Earth. If these delays are not properly corrected for, they may cause significant errors in the timing analysis of a pulsar. These proceedings will review the effects of the interstellar medium on pulse arrival times and present some of the techniques used to mitigate the associated time delays from the pulsar signal. Correcting for these delays is essential to providing a higher timing precision and hence to increasing the array's sensitivity to gravitational waves.