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Published September 11, 2014 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Limitations in timing precision due to single-pulse shape variability in millisecond pulsars

Abstract

High-sensitivity radio-frequency observations of millisecond pulsars usually show stochastic, broad-band, pulse-shape variations intrinsic to the pulsar emission process. These variations induce jitter noise in pulsar timing observations; understanding the properties of this noise is of particular importance for the effort to detect gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays. We assess the short-term profile and timing stability of 22 millisecond pulsars that are part of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array sample by examining intraobservation arrival time variability and single-pulse phenomenology. In 7 of the 22 pulsars, in the band centred at approximately 1400 MHz, we find that the brightest observations are limited by intrinsic jitter. We find consistent results, either detections or upper limits, for jitter noise in other frequency bands. PSR J1909−3744 shows the lowest levels of jitter noise, which we estimate to contribute ∼10 ns root mean square error to the arrival times for hour-duration observations. Larger levels of jitter noise are found in pulsars with wider pulses and distributions of pulse intensities. The jitter noise in PSR J0437−4715 decorrelates over a bandwidth of ∼2 GHz. We show that the uncertainties associated with timing pulsar models can be improved by including physically motivated jitter uncertainties. Pulse-shape variations will limit the timing precision at future, more sensitive, telescopes; it is imperative to account for this noise when designing instrumentation and timing campaigns for these facilities.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 June 12. Received 2014 June 12; in original form 2014 May 15. First published online July 22, 2014. We thank the referee for helpful comments that improved the clarity of the text. The Parkes radio telescope is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. This work was performed on the gSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology. gSTAR is funded by Swinburne and the Australian Government's Education Investment Fund. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council through grant DP140102578. GH is a recipient of a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. VR is a recipient of a John Stocker post-graduate scholarship from the Science and Industry Endowment Fund of Australia. LW acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council. This work made use of NASA's ADS system.

Attached Files

Published - MNRAS-2014-Shannon-1463-81.pdf

Submitted - 1406.4716v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 17, 2023