Speaker
Description
Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) exploit the extreme rotational stability of pulsars to chase the direct detection of nanoHertz-frequency gravitational waves (GWs), hence expanding the accessible windows of the GW spectrum.
In 2023, the European together with the Indian PTA (EPTA, InPTA), the North American PTA and the Australian PTA presented three series of articles reporting the first convincing evidence for a GW signature in the pulsar data collected to date.
This groundbreaking result is not a confirmed discovery yet, as its signal-to-noise does not reach the safe 5$\sigma$ threshold requested for a robust detection. This is mainly because of the numerous other signals that are present in pulsar data, such as intrinsic instabilities of the pulsars and the plasma-induced noise.
To increase the significance of the discovered signature, the EPTA is leveraging on the extraordinary low-frequency pulsar datasets that have been collected with LOFAR and NenuFAR. These are demonstrating to be crucial to identify signals induced by the interstellar medium and the Solar wind.
In this talk I will revise the current status of PTA experiments and the most significant results coming from the combination of LOFAR, NenuFAR and the EPTA data, as well as the role of LOFAR2.0 in the next stages of PTA science.
