An 86-GHz search for Pulsars in the Galactic Center with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

Abstract

We report on the first pulsar and transient survey of the Galactic Center (GC) with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The observations were conducted during the Global Millimeter VLBI Array campaign in 2017 and 2018. We carry out searches using timeseries of both total intensity and other polarization components in the form of Stokes parameters. We incorporate acceleration and its derivative in the pulsar search, and also search in segments of the entire observation to compensate for potential orbital motion of the pulsar. While no new pulsar is found, our observations yield the polarization profile of the GC magnetar PSR J1745-2900 at mm-wavelength for the first time, which turns out to be nearly 100 % linearly polarized. Additionally, we estimate the survey sensitivity placed by both system and red noise, and evaluate its capability of finding pulsars in orbital motion with either Sgr A* or a binary companion. We show that the survey is sensitive to only the most luminous pulsars in the known population, and future observations with ALMA in Band-1 will deliver significantly deeper survey sensitivity on the GC pulsar population.

16 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• The MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane survey I -- System setup and early results
• Prospects for Constraining the Yukawa Gravity with Pulsars around Sagittarius A*
• A Characterization of the ALMA Phasing System at 345 GHz
• Multi-epoch searches for relativistic binary pulsars and fast transients in the Galactic Centre
• Submillimeter pulsations from the magnetar XTE J1810-197
• The High Time Resolution Universe Pulsar Survey -- XVIII. The reprocessing of the HTRU-S Low Lat survey around the Galactic centre using a Fast Folding Algorithm pipeline for accelerated pulsars
• A first search of transients in the Galactic Center from 230 GHz ALMA observations
• Probing the vector charge of Sagittarius A* with pulsar timing
• Prospects for probing small-scale dark matter models with pulsars around Sagittarius A*
• On the Deepest Search for Galactic Center Pulsars and an Examination of an Intriguing Millisecond Pulsar Candidate
• ALMA discovery of Punctum -- a highly polarized mm source in nuclear starburst galaxy NGC 4945
• A survey for radio pulsars and transients in the 10 pc region around Sgr A*
• Nethotrons: exploring the possibility of measuring relativistic spin precessions, from Earth's satellites to the Galactic Centre
• 4-8 GHz Fourier-domain Searches for Galactic Center Pulsars
• Testing the Non-circularity of the Spacetime around Sagittarius A* with Orbiting Pulsars