Related papers: TEMPO2, a new pulsar timing package. I: Overview
Precision pulsar timing is integral to the detection of the nanohertz stochastic gravitational-wave background as well as understanding the physics of neutron stars. Conventional pulsar timing often uses fixed time and frequency-averaged…
Pulsars are remarkably precise "celestial clocks" that can be used to explore many different aspects of physics and astrophysics. In this article I give a brief summary of pulsar properties and describe some of the applications of pulsar…
There have been significant developments in the period estimation tools and methods for analysing high energy pulsars in the past few decades. However, these tools lack well-standardised methods for calculating uncertainties in period…
In the wideband paradigm of pulsar timing, the time of arrival of a pulsar pulse is measured simultaneously with the corresponding dispersion measure from a frequency-resolved integrated pulse profile. We present a new method for performing…
Using observations of pulsars from the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) project we develop the first pulsar-based timescale that has a precision comparable to the uncertainties in international atomic timescales. Our ensemble of pulsars…
Efforts are underway to use high-precision timing of pulsars in order to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. A limit to this technique is the timing noise generated by dispersion in the plasma along the line of sight to the pulsar,…
Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks. On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks. Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from…
Pulsar timing is a technique that uses the highly stable spin periods of neutron stars to investigate a wide range of topics in physics and astrophysics. Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) use sets of extremely well-timed pulsars as a Galaxy-scale…
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…
A new method of polarimetric calibration is presented in which the instrumental response is derived from regular observations of PSR J0437-4715 based on the assumption that the mean polarized emission from this millisecond pulsar remains…
Pulsar timing is a foundational part of pulsar research to triage the most interesting systems and to characterise properties (rotational or otherwise) of the population of these extreme objects. Due to the efficiency of a number of…
This is a very brief summary of the techniques I used to analyze the IPTA challenge 1 data sets. I tried many things, and more failed than succeeded, but in the end I found two approaches that appear to work based on tests done using the…
For pulsar projects it is often necessary to predict the pulse phase in advance, for example, when preparing for new observations. Interpolation of the pulse phase between existing measurements is also often required, for example, when…
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…
To obtain the most accurate pulse arrival times from radio pulsars, it is necessary to correct or mitigate the effects of the propagation of radio waves through the warm and ionised interstellar medium. We examine both the strength of…
The phenomenal rotational stability of millisecond pulsars allows them to be used as precise celestial clocks. An array of these pulsars can be exploited to search for correlated perturbations in their pulse times of arrival due to…
Traditional pulsar timing techniques involve averaging large numbers of single pulses to obtain a high signal-to-noise (S/N) profile, which is matched to a template to measure a time of arrival (TOA). However, the morphology of individual…
Temporal predictive models have the potential to improve decisions in health care, public services, and other domains, yet they often fail to effectively support decision-makers. Prior literature shows that many misalignments between model…
Pulsars provide a wealth of information about General Relativity, the equation of state of superdense matter, relativistic particle acceleration in high magnetic fields, the Galaxy's interstellar medium and magnetic field, stellar and…
The increasing sensitivities of pulsar timing arrays to ultra-low frequency (nHz) gravitational waves promises to achieve direct gravitational wave detection within the next 5-10 years. While there are many parallel efforts being made in…