Scintillation Bandwidth Measurements from 23 Pulsars from the AO327 Survey

Abstract

A pulsar's scintillation bandwidth is inversely proportional to the scattering delay, making accurate measurements of scintillation bandwidth critical to characterize unmitigated delays in efforts to measure low-frequency gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays. In this pilot work, we searched for a subset of known pulsars within $\sim$97% of the data taken with the PUPPI instrument for the AO327 survey with the Arecibo telescope, attempting to measure the scintillation bandwidths in the dataset by fitting to the 2D autocorrelation function of their dynamic spectra. We successfully measured 38 bandwidths from 23 pulsars (six without prior literature values), finding that: almost all of the measurements are larger than the predictions from NE2001 and YMW16 (two popular galactic models); NE2001 is more consistent with our measurements than YMW16; Gaussian fits to the bandwidth are more consistent with both electron density models than Lorentzian ones; and for the 17 pulsars with prior literature values, the measurements between various sources often vary by factors of a few. The success of Gaussian fits may be due to the use of Gaussian fits to train models in previous work. The variance of literature values over time could relate to the scaling factor used to compare measurements, but also seems consistent with time-varying interstellar medium parameters. This work can be extended to the rest of AO327 to further investigate these trends, highlighting the continuing importance of large archival datasets for projects beyond their initial conception.

21 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (16)

• A New Electron Density Model for Estimation of Pulsar and FRB Distances
• PSRCHIVE and PSRFITS An Open Approach to Radio Pulsar Data Storage and Analysis
• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Observations and Timing of 68 Millisecond Pulsars
• Common-red-signal analysis with 24-yr high-precision timing of the European Pulsar Timing Array: Inferences in the stochastic gravitational-wave background search
• The Indian Pulsar Timing Array: First data release
• The Parkes pulsar timing array second data release: Timing analysis
• A comparison of Galactic electron density models using PyGEDM
• Precision orbital dynamics from interstellar scintillation arcs for PSR J0437-4715
• Electron Density Structure of the Local Galactic Disk
• The NANOGrav 12.5-year Data Set: Bayesian Limits on Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
• Regimes in astrophysical lensing: refractive optics, diffractive optics, and the Fresnel scale
• Pulsar scintillation studies with LOFAR. I. The census
• The NANOGrav 12.5-Year Data Set: Monitoring Interstellar Scattering Delays
• Long-term scintillation studies of EPTA pulsars. I. Observations and basic results
• A Study in Frequency-Dependent Effects on Precision Pulsar Timing Parameters with the Pulsar Signal Simulator
• A Simultaneous Dual-Frequency Scintillation Arc Survey of Six Bright Canonical Pulsars Using the Upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Manifestation of Quantum Forces in Spacetime: Towards a General Theory of Quantum Forces