Pith Number

pith:2HXK5YCC

pith:2026:2HXK5YCCEBH2RGV3Z5MQUHAGX7

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Are PTA measurements sensitive to gravitational wave non-Gaussianities?

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

PTA data after decorrelation cannot distinguish Gaussian from non-Gaussian gravitational wave backgrounds without strong assumptions.

arxiv:2605.05157 v2 · 2026-05-06 · astro-ph.CO · astro-ph.HE · gr-qc · hep-ph

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{2HXK5YCCEBH2RGV3Z5MQUHAGX7}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

even in an idealized signal-dominated setup, after decorrelating data to avoid spurious detections, statistical tests applied to PTA data cannot distinguish between Gaussian and non-Gaussian GWBs 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.

C2weakest assumption

The conclusion depends on an idealized signal-dominated setup together with the assumption that decorrelation fully removes spurious correlations without erasing genuine non-Gaussian information; the result is stated to hold only in the absence of strong prior assumptions on spectrum or population.

C3one line summary

PTA statistical tests lose sensitivity to non-Gaussian GW features after decorrelation and cannot distinguish them model-agnostically.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-19T16:10:38.368361Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

d1eeaee042204fa89abbcf590a1c06bfea3e9ceb5d3b8cb6477296114fbb8450

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.05157 · arxiv_version: 2605.05157v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.05157 · pith_short_12: 2HXK5YCCEBH2 · pith_short_16: 2HXK5YCCEBH2RGV3 · pith_short_8: 2HXK5YCC

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/2HXK5YCCEBH2RGV3Z5MQUHAGX7 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: d1eeaee042204fa89abbcf590a1c06bfea3e9ceb5d3b8cb6477296114fbb8450

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "69cc92300f2284d38a400ae4792da372647aa41e69d6692b1633b927d65f7c23",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.HE",
      "gr-qc",
      "hep-ph"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.CO",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-06T17:28:29Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "07fdc7dfc483afbaa64285a43fcc0b47539348992f60b84c812df71c21e46a30"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.05157",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}