Detection and localization of continuous gravitational waves with pulsar
  timing arrays: the role of pulsar terms
  A pulsar timing array is a Galactic-scale detector of nanohertz gravitational
waves (GWs). Its target signals contain two components: the `Earth term' and
the `pulsar term' corresponding to GWs incident on the Earth and pulsar
respectively. In this work we present a Frequentist method for the detection
and localization of continuous waves that takes into account the pulsar term
and is significantly faster than existing methods. We investigate the role of
pulsar terms by comparing a full-signal search with an Earth-term-only search
for non-evolving black hole binaries. By applying the method to synthetic data
sets, we find that (i) a full-signal search can slightly improve the detection
probability (by about five percent); (ii) sky localization is biased if only
Earth terms are searched for and the inclusion of pulsar terms is critical to
remove such a bias; (iii) in the case of strong detections (with
signal-to-noise ratio $\gtrsim$ 30), it may be possible to improve pulsar
distance estimation through GW measurements.
