Andrew Cameron (MPIfR)

Andrew Cameron Colloquium: News from the HTRU-South Low Latitude pulsar survey

Marsfield Lecture Theatre

Abstract

The HTRU-South Low Latitude pulsar survey represents the most
sensitive blind pulsar survey taken of the southern Galactic plane to
date. With long integration times and a custom acceleration search
pipeline, the aim of this survey has been to discover both new
relativistic binary systems and low-luminosity pulsars, with 102
discoveries having been made thus far. Here we present our searching
strategy and some of our discovery highlights. In particular, we report
on the discovery of a new relativistic binary pulsar found as part of
this survey. With a short orbital period of 4.4 hours and an
eccentricity of 0.606, this double neutron star system represents the
most relativistic binary pulsar discovered in our Galaxy to date, with
the potential to set new limits on gravitational theories such as
General Relativity. In conjunction with a recently submitted paper, we
also report on the results of an investigation into the Fast Folding
Algorithm, a time-based pulsar searching technique which presents
advantages over the Fast Fourier Transform in the search for long-period
pulsars (P> 1 second). This investigation includes a practical
demonstration on pulsars taken from the HTRU-South Low Latitude survey.