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Simulation-based inference of radio millisecond pulsars in globular clusters

J Berteaud, C Eckner, F Calore, M Clavel… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
Astrophysics paper astro-ph.HE Suggest

… In this work, we tackled this problem through an analysis framework which quickly developed in the last decade: likelihood-free/simulation-based inference. Our method …

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BibTeX

@article{2405.15691v1,
Author        = {Joanna Berteaud and Christopher Eckner and Francesca Calore and Maïca Clavel and Daryl Haggard},
Title         = {Simulation-based inference of radio millisecond pulsars in globular
  clusters},
Eprint        = {2405.15691v1},
ArchivePrefix = {arXiv},
PrimaryClass  = {astro-ph.HE},
Abstract      = {Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are abundant in globular clusters (GCs), which
offer favorable environments for their creation. While the advent of recent,
powerful facilities led to a rapid increase in MSP discoveries in GCs through
pulsation searches, detection biases persist. In this work, we investigate the
ability of current and future detections in GCs to constrain the parameters of
the MSP population in GCs through a careful study of their luminosity function.
Parameters of interest are the number of MSPs hosted by a GC, as well as the
mean and the width of their luminosity function, which are typically affected
by large uncertainties. While, as we show, likelihood-based studies can lead to
ill-behaved posterior on the size of the MSP population, we introduce a novel,
likelihood-free analysis, based on Marginal Neural Ratio Estimation, which
consistently produces well-behaved posteriors. We focus on the GC Terzan 5,
which currently counts 48 detected MSPs. We find that about 158 MSPs should be
hosted in this GC, but the uncertainty on this number remains large. We explore
the performance of our new method on simulated Terzan 5-like datasets mimicking
possible future observational outcomes. We find that significant improvement on
the posteriors can be obtained by adding a reliable measurement of the diffuse
radio emission of the GC to the analysis or by improving the detection
threshold of current radio pulsation surveys by at least a factor two.},
Year          = {2024},
Month         = {May},
Url           = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15691v1},
File          = {2405.15691v1.pdf}
}

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