The Swinburne intermediate-latitude pulsar survey

Abstract

We have conducted a survey of intermediate Galactic latitudes using the 13‐beam 21‐cm multibeam receiver of the Parkes 64‐m radio telescope. The survey covered the region enclosed by 5°<|b|<15° and −100°<l<50° with 4702 processed pointings of 265 s each, for a total of 14.5 d of integration time. 13 2×96‐channel filterbanks provided 288 MHz of bandwidth at a centre frequency of 1374 MHz, one‐bit sampled every 125 μs and incurring ∼DM/13.4 cm−3 pc samples of dispersion smearing. The system was sensitive to slow and most millisecond pulsars in the region with flux densities greater than approximately 0.3–1.1 mJy. Offline analysis on the 64‐node Swinburne workstation cluster resulted in the detection of 170 pulsars of which 69 were new discoveries. Eight of the new pulsars, by virtue of their small spin periods and period derivatives, may be recycled and have been reported elsewhere. The slow pulsars discovered are typical of those already known in the volume searched, being of intermediate to old age. Several pulsars experience pulse nulling and two display very regular drifting subpulses. We discuss the new discoveries and provide timing parameters for the 48 slow pulsars for which we have a phase‐connected solution.

Fifty years of pulsar candidate selection: from simple filters to a new principled real-time classification approach

“…weaker pulsars, see Section 4.2.1) if it is to reduce candidate numbers. The second option is to impose a smaller constant cut-off C to the candidates collected per observation or beam, also done by many (Edwards et al 2001;Jacoby et al 2009;Bates et al 2012;Thornton 2013) and accounted for in our model. Figure 2 shows these two methods to be fundamentally the same.…”

“…The first of these, runview (Burgay et al 2006), was created to analyse data output by the Parkes Multibeam Survey (PMPS, Manchester et al 2001). During the Swinburne Intermediate-latitude survey, Edwards et al (2001) devised a similar graphical tool that included distributional information of candidate parameters. A later reprocessing of PMPS data for binary and millisecond pulsars, spawned the development of a more sophisticated graphical tool for candidate viewing called reaper.…”

“…Domain experience usually plays a role in determining the level, but this is often not specified and difficult to quantify. Levels used include 6σ (Damashek et al 1978;Thornton 2013), 6.3σ (Manchester et al 1978), 7σ (Foster et al 1995;Hessels et al 2007), 7.5σ (Manchester et al 1996), 8σ (Stokes et al 1986;Johnston et al 1992;Manchester et al 2001;Edwards et al 2001;Burgay et al 2006Burgay et al , 2013, 8.5σ (Nice et al 1995), 9σ (Jacoby et al 2009;Bates et al 2011a), and finally 9.5σ (Jacoby et al 2009).…”

“…Manual approaches therefore became impractical, introducing what has become known as the 'candidate selection problem'. In response, numerous graphical and automated selection methods were developed (Johnston et al 1992;Manchester et al 2001;Edwards et al 2001;Navarro et al 2003;Keith et al 2009), designed to filter candidates in bulk. The filtering procedure used ranged in complexity from a simple signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) cut, through to more complex functions (Lee et al 2013).…”

The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey – VII. Timing of four millisecond pulsars and the underlying spin-period distribution of the Galactic millisecond pulsar population

“…In this paper, we focus on constraining the spin period distribution of MSPs. For this study, we define a MSP as a pulsar with P < 20 ms. Our final sample of 56 MSPs is drawn from detections by this survey (PMPS), the Swinburne Intermediate Latitude Survey (SWIL; Edwards et al 2001), the Swinburne High Latitude Survey (SWHL; Jacoby et al 2007), the Parkes High Latitude Survey (PH; Burgay et al 2006), the Perseus Arm Survey (PA; Burgay et al 2013), and the Deep Multibeam Survey (DMB; Lorimer et al 2013). The basic parameters of this sample of pulsars are summarized in Table 3.…”