Intrinsic Instrumental Polarization and High-Precision Pulsar Timing

Abstract

Radio telescopes are used to accurately measure the time of arrival (ToA) of radio pulses in pulsar timing experiments that target mostly millisecond pulsars (MSPs) due to their high rotational stability. This allows for detailed study of MSPs and forms the basis of experiments to detect gravitational waves. Apart from intrinsic and propagation effects, such as pulse-to-pulse jitter and dispersion variations in the interstellar medium, timing precision is limited in part by the following: polarization purity of the telescope's orthogonally polarized receptors, the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of the pulsar profile, and the polarization fidelity of the system. Using simulations, we present how fundamental limitations in recovering the true polarization reduce the precision of ToA measurements. Any real system will respond differently to each source observed depending on the unique pulsar polarization profile. Using the profiles of known MSPs we quantify the limits of observing system specifications that yield satisfactory ToA measurements, and we place a practical design limit beyond which improvement of the system results in diminishing returns. Our aim is to justify limits for the front-end polarization characteristics of next generation radio telescopes, leading to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

13 pages, 10 figures, 1 tables, accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (7)

• TEMPO2, a new pulsar timing package. I: Overview
• PSRCHIVE and PSRFITS An Open Approach to Radio Pulsar Data Storage and Analysis
• The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project
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Cited by in corpus (12)

• An ultra-wide bandwidth (704 to 4032 MHz) receiver for the Parkes radio telescope
• The MeerKAT Telescope as a Pulsar Facility: System verification and early science results from MeerTime
• The CHIME Pulsar Project: System Overview
• Polarization leakage in epoch of reionization windows: II. Primary beam model and direction dependent calibration
• Constraining Polarized Foregrounds for EOR Experiments II: Polarization Leakage Simulations in the Avoidance Scheme
• Observations of Low-Frequency Radio Emission from Millisecond Pulsars and Multipath Propagation in the Interstellar Medium
• Improving pulsar polarization and timing measurements with the Nançay Radio Telescope
• Observing Pulsars with a Phased Array Feed at the Parkes Telescope
• On Frequency-Dependent Dispersion Measures and Extreme Scattering Events
• Detection of frequency-dependent dispersion measure toward the millisecond pulsar PSR J2241-5236 from contemporaneous wide-band observations
• Exploring pulsar timing precision: A comparative study of polarization calibration methods for NANOGrav data from the Green Bank Telescope
• The polarimetric response of the Nançay Radio Telescope and its impact on precision pulsar timing