Searching for Millisecond Pulsars: Surveys, Techniques and Prospects

Abstract

Searches for millisecond pulsars (which we here loosely define as those with periods $<$ 20 ms) in the Galactic field have undergone a renaissance in the past five years. New or recently refurbished radio telescopes utilizing cooled receivers and state-of-the art digital data acquisition systems are carrying out surveys of the entire sky at a variety of radio frequencies. Targeted searches for millisecond pulsars in point sources identified by the {\it Fermi} Gamma-ray Space Telescope have proved phenomenally successful, with over 50 discoveries in the past five years. The current sample of millisecond pulsars now numbers almost 200 and, for the first time in 25 years, now outnumbers their counterparts in Galactic globular clusters. While many of these searches are motivated to find pulsars which form part of pulsar timing arrays, a wide variety of interesting systems are now being found. Following a brief overview of the millisecond pulsar phenomenon, we describe these searches and present some of the highlights of the new discoveries in the past decade. We conclude with predictions and prospects for ongoing and future surveys.

16 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum gravity

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Fifty Years of Pulsar Candidate Selection: From simple filters to a new principled real-time classification approach
• Radio detection prospects for a bulge population of millisecond pulsars as suggested by Fermi LAT observations of the inner Galaxy
• Timing of five millisecond pulsars discovered in the PALFA survey
• The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey: VII. Timing of four millisecond pulsars and the underlying spin period distribution of the Galactic millisecond pulsar population
• The effect of small inter-pulsar distance variations in stochastic gravitational wave background searches with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The LOFAR Tied-Array All-Sky Survey (LOTAAS): Characterization of 20 pulsar discoveries and their single-pulse behavior
• LB-1 is inconsistent with the X-ray source population and pulsar-black hole binary searches in the Milky Way