Papers › Exploring pulsar timing precision: A comparative study of polarization calibration...
Exploring pulsar timing precision: A comparative study of polarization calibration methods for NANOGrav data from the Green Bank Telescope
Lankeswar Dey, Maura A. McLaughlin, Haley M. Wahl, Paul B. Demorest, Zaven Arzoumanian, Harsha Blumer, Paul R. Brook, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, H. Thankful Cromartie, Megan E. DeCesar, Timothy Dolch, Justin A. Ellis, Robert D. Ferdman, Elizabeth C. Ferrara, William Fiore, Emmanuel Fonseca, Nate Garver-Daniels, Peter A. Gentile, Joseph Glaser, Deborah C. Good, Ross J. Jennings, Megan L. Jones, Michael T. Lam, Duncan R. Lorimer, Jing Luo, Ryan S. Lynch, Cherry Ng, David J. Nice, Timothy T. Pennucci, Nihan S. Pol, Scott M. Ransom, Renée Spiewak, Ingrid H. Stairs, Kevin Stovall, Joseph K. Swiggum
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Pulsar timing array experiments have recently uncovered evidence for a nanohertz gravitational wave background by precisely timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars. The next significant milestones for these experiments include characterizing the detected background with greater precision, identifying its source(s), and detecting continuous gravitational waves from individual supermassive black hole binaries. To achieve these objectives, generating accurate and precise times of arrival of pulses from pulsar observations is crucial. Incorrect polarization calibration of the observed pulsar profiles may introduce errors in the measured times of arrival. Further, previous studies (e.g., van Straten 2013; Manchester et al. 2013) have demonstrated that robust polarization calibration of pulsar profiles can reduce noise in the pulsar timing data and improve timing solutions. In this paper, we investigate and compare the impact of different polarization calibration methods on pulsar timing precision using three distinct calibration techniques: the Ideal Feed Assumption (IFA), Measurement Equation Modeling (MEM), and Measurement Equation Template Matching (METM). Three NANOGrav pulsars-PSRs J1643-1224, J1744-1134, and J1909-3744-observed with the 800 MHz and 1.5 GHz receivers at the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) are utilized for our analysis. Our findings reveal that all three calibration methods enhance timing precision compared to scenarios where no polarization calibration is performed. Additionally, among the three calibration methods, the IFA approach generally provides the best results for timing analysis of pulsars observed with the GBT receiver system. We attribute the comparatively poorer performance of the MEM and METM methods to potential instabilities in the reference noise diode coupled to the receiver and temporal variations in the profile of the reference pulsar, respectively.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections