We present the discovery of five millisecond pulsars (MSPs) from the PALFA Galactic plane survey using Arecibo. Four of these (PSRs J0557+1551, J1850+0244, J1902+0300, and J1943+2210) are binary pulsars whose companions are likely white dwarfs, and one (PSR J1905+0453) is isolated. Phase-coherent timing solutions, ranging from ∼1 to ∼3 years in length, and based on observations from the Jodrell Bank and Arecibo telescopes, provide precise determinations of spin, orbital, and astrometric parameters. All five pulsars have large dispersion measures (>100 pc cm−3, within the top 20% of all known Galactic field MSPs) and are faint (1.4 GHz flux density < 0.1 mJy, within the faintest 5% of all known Galactic field MSPs), illustrating PALFA's ability to find increasingly faint, distant MSPs in the Galactic plane. In particular, PSR J1850+0244 has a dispersion measure of 540 pc cm−3, the highest of all known MSPs. Such distant, faint MSPs are important input for accurately modeling the total Galactic MSP population.
@article{arxiv.1501.03746,
title = {Timing of five millisecond pulsars discovered in the PALFA survey},
author = {P. Scholz and V. M. Kaspi and A. G. Lyne and B. W. Stappers and S. Bogdanov and J. M. Cordes and F. Crawford and R. D. Ferdman and P. C. C. Freire and J. W. T. Hessels and D. R. Lorimer and I. H. Stairs and B. Allen and A. Brazier and F. Camilo and R. F. Cardoso and S. Chatterjee and J. S. Deneva and F. A. Jenet and C. Karako-Argaman and B. Knispel and P. Lazarus and K. J. Lee and J. van Leeuwen and R. Lynch and E. C. Madsen and M. A. McLaughlin and S. M. Ransom and X. Siemens and L. G. Spitler and K. Stovall and J. K. Swiggum and A. Venkataraman and W. W. Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.03746},
year = {2015}
}