Speaker
Description
Pulsar timing arrays are becoming sensitive to individual supermassive black hole binaries above the nanohertz gravitational-wave background. I will present a harmonic-space framework that consistently incorporates irregular pulsar sampling, non-uniform noise, source confusion, and pulsar terms. By marginalizing over unknown pulsar phases, we obtain a parameter-dependent covariance and derive the corresponding likelihood, detection statistic, and Fisher information. Combined with a Poisson population model, the framework yields semi-analytic predictions for the number and probability of resolvable binaries and clarifies how observation time determine the continuous-wave discovery potential of current and future pulsar timing arrays observations. Following MCMC tests further demonstrate at sufficiently high SNR ratio, the proposed likelihood accurately recovers the single source parameters.