Scattering Delay Mitigation in High Accuracy Pulsar Timing: Cyclic Spectroscopy Techniques

Abstract

We simulate scattering delays from the interstellar medium to examine the effectiveness of three estimators in recovering these delays in pulsar timing data. Two of these estimators use the more traditional process of fitting autocorrelation functions to pulsar dynamic spectra to extract scintillation bandwidths, while the third estimator uses the newer technique of cyclic spectroscopy on baseband pulsar data to recover the interstellar medium's impulse response function. We find that either fitting a Lorentzian or Gaussian distribution to an autocorrelation function or recovering the impulse response function from the cyclic spectrum are, on average, accurate in recovering scattering delays, although autocorrelation function estimators have a large variance, even at high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). We find that, given sufficient S/N, cyclic spectroscopy is more accurate than both Gaussian and Lorentzian fitting for recovering scattering delays at specific epochs, suggesting that cyclic spectroscopy is a superior method for scattering estimation in high quality data.

arXiv commentAccepted to ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• The NANOGrav 15-Year Data Set: Detector Characterization and Noise Budget
• A Cyclic Spectroscopy Scintillation Study of PSR B1937+21 I. Demonstration of Improved Scintillometry
• Exploring pulsar timing precision: A comparative study of polarization calibration methods for NANOGrav data from the Green Bank Telescope
• Pulsar Cyclic Spectroscopy in the Partial-Deconvolution Regime: Benefits & Limitations