Doubling Down on Single-Source Sensitivity in Pulsar Timing Arrays

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) will soon detect the gravitational wave background from supermassive binary black holes in our cosmological neighborhood. In the next decade PTAs will set their sights on detecting a number of resolvable binary systems, which will be the first quasi-continuous sources of gravitational waves. These systems have the potential to be long-lived multimessenger systems, if the constituent black holes lie at the center of an active galactic nuclei. As PTAs change their focus towards single sources, understanding the sources of high frequency noise and developing algorithms to mitigate that noise will be become an important next step in detecting sources above 10 nanoHertz. Here we discuss strategies to characterize this noise and develop observing strategies to allow for optimal single-source sensitivity.