English

A Statistical Analysis of Crab Pulsar Giant Pulse Rates

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-07-24 v1

Abstract

A small number of pulsars are known to emit giant pulses, single pulses much brighter than average. Among these is PSR J0534+2200, also known as the Crab pulsar, a young pulsar with high giant pulse rates. Long-term monitoring of the Crab pulsar presents an excellent opportunity to perform statistical studies of its giant pulses and the processes affecting them, potentially providing insight into the behavior of other neutron stars that emit bright single pulses. Here, we present an analysis of a set of 24,985 Crab giant pulses obtained from 88 hours of daily observations at a center frequency of 1.55 GHz by the 20-meter telescope at the Green Bank Observatory, spread over 461 days. We study the effects of refractive scintillation at higher frequencies than previous studies and compare methods of correcting for this effect. We also search for deterministic patterns seen in other single-pulse sources, possible periodicities seen in several rotating radio transients and fast radio bursts, and clustering of giant pulses like that seen in the repeating fast radio burst FRB121102.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.15996,
  title  = {A Statistical Analysis of Crab Pulsar Giant Pulse Rates},
  author = {Graham M. Doskoch and Andrea Basuroski and Kriisa Halley and Avinash Sookram and Iliomar Rodriguez-Ramos and Valmik Nahata and Zahi Rahman and Maureen Zhang and Ashish Uhlmann and Abby Lynch and Natalia Lewandowska and Nohely Miranda and Ann Schmiedekamp and Carl Schmiedekamp and Maura A. McLaughlin and Daniel E. Reichart and Joshua B. Haislip and Vladimir V. Kouprianov and Steve White and Frank Ghigo and Sue Ann Heatherly},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.15996},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages, 14 figures, accepted to ApJ