A Large-Area Survey for Radio Pulsars at High Galactic Latitudes

Abstract

We have completed a survey for pulsars at high Galactic latitudes with the 64 m Parkes radio telescope. Observing with the 13 beam multibeam receiver at a frequency of 1374 MHz, we covered ~4150 square degrees in the region –100° ≤ l ≤ 50°, 15° ≤ |b| ≤ 30° with 7232 pointings of 265 s each, thus extending the Swinburne Intermediate Latitude Pulsar Survey a further 15° on either side of the Galactic plane. The signal from each beam was processed by a 96 channel × 3 MHz × 2 polarization filterbank, with the detected power in the two polarizations of each frequency channel summed and digitized with 1 bit sampling every 125 μs, giving good sensitivity to millisecond pulsars with low or moderate dispersion measure. The resulting 2.4 TB data set was processed using standard pulsar search techniques with the workstation cluster at the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. This survey resulted in the discovery of 26 new pulsars including seven binary and/or millisecond pulsars, and redetected 36 previously known pulsars. We describe the survey methodology and results, and present timing solutions for the 19 newly discovered slow pulsars, as well as for nine slow pulsars discovered the Swinburne Intermediate Latitude Pulsar Survey that had no previous timing solutions. Even with a small sampling interval, 1374 MHz center frequency, and a large mid-latitude survey volume we failed to detect any very rapidly spinning pulsars. Evidently, such "submillisecond" pulsars are rare.

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