• Accepted Paper

Are pulsar timing array measurements sensitive to gravitational wave non-Gaussianities?

Chiara Cecchini, Jonas El Gammal, Gabriele Franciolini, and Mauro Pieroni

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 30 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/kcr9-nbjk

Abstract

Observing non-Gaussianities in the timing residuals of Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) has recently attracted attention as a potential discriminator between astrophysical and cosmological origins of the observed Gravitational Wave (GW) signal. In this work, we show that even in an idealized signal-dominated setup, after decorrelating the data to avoid spurious detections, statistical tests applied to PTA data cannot distinguish between a Gaussian and a non-Gaussian amplitude distribution of the GWB in a model-agnostic way. In particular, without making strong assumptions on the GW spectrum or the properties of the population, the sensitivity to any distinctive non-Gaussian feature is washed out.

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