MeerTime - the MeerKAT Key Science Program on Pulsar Timing

Abstract

The MeerKAT telescope represents an outstanding opportunity for radio pulsar timing science with its unique combination of a large collecting area and aperture efficiency (effective area $\sim$7500 m${}^2$), system temperature ($T<20$K), high slew speeds (1-2 deg/s), large bandwidths (770 MHz at 20cm wavelengths), southern hemisphere location (latitude $\sim -30^{\circ }$) and ability to form up to four sub-arrays. The MeerTime project is a five-year program on the MeerKAT array by an international consortium that will regularly time over 1000 radio pulsars to perform tests of relativistic gravity, search for the gravitational wave signature induced by supermassive black hole binaries in the timing residuals of millisecond pulsars, explore the interiors of neutron stars through a pulsar glitch monitoring programme, explore the origin and evolution of binary pulsars, monitor the swarms of pulsars that inhabit globular clusters and monitor radio magnetars. In addition to these primary programmes, over 1000 pulsars will have their arrival times monitored and the data made immediately public. The MeerTime pulsar backend comprises two server-class machines each of which possess four Graphics Processing Units. Up to four pulsars can be coherently dedispersed simultaneously up to dispersion measures of over 1000 pc cm${}^{-3}$. All data will be provided in psrfits format. The MeerTime backend will be capable of producing coherently dedispersed filterbank data for timing multiple pulsars in the cores of globular clusters that is useful for pulsar searches of tied array beams. All MeerTime data will ultimately be made available for public use, and any published results will include the arrival times and profiles used in the results.

arXiv comment15 pages, MeerKAT Science: On the Pathway to the SKA, 25-27 May, 2016, Stellenbosch, South Africa, available at: https://pos.sissa.it/277/011/pdf

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• Transient pulsed radio emission from a magnetar
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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Precision orbital dynamics from interstellar scintillation arcs for PSR J0437-4715
• Constraining the dense matter equation-of-state with radio pulsars
• Frequency-Dependent Template Profiles for High Precision Pulsar Timing
• Cosmological Constraints on First-Order Phase Transitions
• A revisit of PSR J1909$-$3744 with 15-year high-precision timing
• Gaia pulsars and where to find them
• The minimum and maximum gravitational-wave background from supermassive binary black holes
• Shapiro delay in PSR~J1811$-$2405
• Galactic Double Neutron Star total masses and Gaussian mixture model selection
• Constraints from globular cluster pulsars on the magnetic field in the Galactic halo
• Scintillation can explain the spectral structure of the bright radio burst from SGR 1935+2154
• Radio Afterglows from Compact Binary Coalescences: Prospects for Next-Generation Telescopes
• Lorentz-violating matter-gravity couplings in small-eccentricity binary pulsars
• Pulsar timing irregularities and the Neutron Star interior in the era of SKA: An Indian Outlook
• Precision Timing of PSR J0437-4715 with the IAR Observatory and Implications for Low-Frequency Gravitational Wave Source Sensitivity
• A Parallelized Bayesian Approach To Accelerated Gravitational-Wave Background Characterization