A 1400-MHz pilot search for young pulsars

Abstract

We have used the Effelsberg 100-m radio telescope to conduct a 1400-MHz ($\hat{I}»$ 21-cm) search for young and rapidly rotating radio pulsars along a 2 deg${}^2$ strip of the northern Galactic plane defined by $28^{\circ }\le l\le 30^{\circ }$ and $|b|\le 0.5^{\circ }$. This region lies close to the Scutum spiral arm which is already known to contain a number of radio and X-ray pulsars. The search was nominally sensitive to pulsars with 1400-MHz flux densities above 0.3 mJy; this represents a threefold improvement in sensitivity over all previous searches of this region of the Galaxy. Four new long-period pulsars were discovered as a result of this survey. All three previously known pulsars in this region were also detected. The four new pulsars are relatively young ($<$ 0.5 Myr), weak ($<1$ mJy) sources with dispersion measures in the range 180--910 cm${}^{-3}$ pc. None of the newly-discovered pulsars are associated with catalogued supernova remnants.

16 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics (minor changes to submitted version)