Related papers: A Study in Frequency-Dependent Effects on Precisio…
Timing pulses of pulsars has proved to be a most powerful technique useful to a host of research areas in astronomy and physics. Importantly, the precision of this timing is not only affected by radiometer noise, but also by intrinsic pulse…
Radio emission propagating over an Earth-pulsar line of sight provides a unique probe of the intervening ionized interstellar medium (ISM). Variations in the integrated electron column density along this line of sight, or dispersion measure…
Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) searches for nHz gravitational-wave backgrounds (GWBs) typically model time-correlated noise by assuming a diagonal covariance in Fourier space, neglecting inter-frequency correlations introduced by the finite…
Broadband radio waves emitted from pulsars are distorted and delayed as they propagate toward the Earth due to interactions with the free electrons that compose the interstellar medium, with lower radio frequencies being more impacted than…
Over the past few decades, the measurement precision of some pulsar-timing experiments has advanced from ~10 us to ~10 ns, revealing many subtle phenomena. Such high precision demands both careful data handling and sophisticated timing…
Precision pulsar timing can be used for a variety of astrophysical tests from the detection of gravitational waves to probing the properties of the interstellar medium (ISM). Here we present analyses of the noise contributions to pulsar…
We investigate the impact of noise processes on high-precision pulsar timing. Our analysis focuses on the measurability of the second spin frequency derivative $\ddot{\nu}$. This $\ddot{\nu}$ can be induced by several factors including the…
At the highest levels of pulsar timing precision achieved to date, experiments are limited by noise intrinsic to the pulsar. This stochastic wideband impulse modulated self-noise (SWIMS) limits pulsar timing precision by randomly biasing…
We investigate the impact of intrinsic, kinematic and gravitational effects on high precision pulsar timing. We present an analytical derivation and a numerical computation of the impact of these effects on the first and second derivative…
Pulsar searches are computationally demanding efforts to discover dispersed periodic signals in time- and frequency-resolved data from radio telescopes. The complexity and computational expense of simultaneously determining the…
Pulsar Timing Arrays have yet to convincingly observe gravitational waves. Some time ago it was pointed out by one of the authors that a dramatic enhancement of the signal would take place for particular values of the angle subtended by the…
Observations of pulsars across the radio spectrum are revealing a dependence of the characteristic scattering time ($\tau$) on frequency, which is more complex than the simple power law with a theoretically predicted power law index. In…
We analyse dispersion measure (DM) variations in six years of radio observations of more than 160 young pulsars, all gamma ray candidates for the Fermi gamma ray telescope mostly located close to the Galactic plane. DMs were fit across 256…
Dispersion in the interstellar medium is a well known phenomenon that follows a simple relationship, which has been used to predict the time delay of dispersed radio pulses since the late 1960s. We performed wide-band simultaneous…
Pulsars are unique astrophysical laboratories because of their clock-like timing precision, providing new ways to test general relativity and detect gravitational waves. One impediment to high-precision pulsar timing experiments is timing…
Pulsar timing is a powerful tool that, by accounting for every rotation of a pulsar, precisely measures the spin frequency, spin frequency derivatives, astrometric position, binary parameters when applicable, properties of the ISM, and…
Pulsars are known to display short-term variability. Recently, examples of longer-term emission variability have emerged that are often correlated with changes in the rotational properties of the pulsar. To further illuminate this…
The measurement error of pulse times of arrival (TOAs) in the high S/N limit is dominated by the quasi-random variation of a pulsar's emission profile from rotation to rotation. Like measurement noise, this noise is only reduced as the…
Pulsar Timing Arrays use a set of millisecond pulsars in an attempt to directly detect nanohertz gravitational waves. For this purpose, high precision timing of the pulsars is essential and ultimately a precision of the order of ~100 ns is…
Frequency metrology outperforms any other branch of metrology in accuracy (parts in $10^{-16}$) and small fluctuations ($<10^{-17}$). In turn, among celestial bodies, the rotation speed of millisecond pulsars (MSP) is by far the most stable…