paper

Pulsar observations at millimetre wavelengths

arXiv:1806.10617 · doi:10.1017/S1743921317009085

Abstract

Detecting and studying pulsars above a few GHz in the radio band is challenging due to the typical faintness of pulsar radio emission, their steep spectra, and the lack of observatories with sufficient sensitivity operating at high frequency ranges. Despite the difficulty, the observations of pulsars at high radio frequencies are valuable because they can help us to understand the radio emission process, complete a census of the Galactic pulsar population, and possibly discover the elusive population in the Galactic Centre, where low-frequency observations have problems due to the strong scattering. During the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, the availability of sensitive instrumentation allowed for the detection of a small sample of pulsars above 10GHz, and for the first time in the millimetre band. Recently, new attempts between 3 and 1mm (86300GHz) have resulted in the detections of a pulsar and a magnetar up to the highest radio frequencies to date, reaching 291GHz (1.03mm). The efforts continue, and the advent of new or upgraded millimetre facilities like the IRAM 30-m, NOEMA, the LMT, and ALMA, warrants a new era of high-sensitivity millimetre pulsar astronomy in the upcoming years.

4 pages. Published in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium 337 Pulsar Astrophysics - The Next 50 Years

References in corpus (10)