Yan Wang¹, Soumya D. Mohanty² and Yi-Qian Qian¹
1 School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road,
Wuhan, Hubei Province 430074, China
2 Department of Physics, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley,
One West University Blvd, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA
E-mail: ywang12@hust.edu.cn

Abstract. Resolvable Supermassive Black Hole Binaries are promising sources for Pulsar Timing Array based gravitational wave searches. Search algorithms for such targets must contend with the large number of so-called pulsar phase parameters in the joint log-likelihood
function of the data. We compare the localization accuracy for two approaches: Maximization over the pulsar phase parameters (MaxPhase) against marginalization over them (AvPhase). Using simulated data from a pulsar timing array with 17 pulsars, we find that for weak and
moderately strong signals, AvPhase outperforms MaxPhase significantly, while they perform comparably for strong signals.

IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 840 (2017) 012058

doi :10.1088/1742-6596/840/1/012058