Application of Efron-Petrosian method to radio pulsar fluxes

Abstract

We apply the Efron-Petrosian technique to radio fluxes of pulsars detected in the Parkes multi-beam survey to test the independence of luminosity and distance. For this dataset, we find that for four different distance exponents (ranging from 0.5 to 2), the flux thresholds at which the luminosity and distances are uncorrelated, correspond to very low p-values for the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test between the truncated and untruncated datasets. This is due to the fact that the Parkes multi-beam survey is not sufficiently homogeneous to lend itself to a treatment by the Efron-Petrosian method. We then repeat the analysis after rendering the dataset more homogeneous by excluding the distant pulsars from this sample. We find that for this culled dataset, the flux is consistent with distance exponents of 1.5 and 2.0.