...
i) David will write this summary. Done.
ii) David will begin the re-write of the new MoU+PSC document to touch some of the above points. (Observation
strategy details are beyond the scope of the document).
iii) David will inform the rest of the consortium (namely, our GBT & Arecibo friends) of the austral-european intent. Mostly done -- there was a face-to-face with Fernando and Scott and LAT folks at the Fermi Symposium on November 4th, Dave JT and/or J Eric G will write up some minutes.
Discussion of Future Pulsar Timing and Searching Efforts Involving Fermi LAT
November 5, 2009
Attendees: Parent, Guillemot, Ransom, Camilo, Grove, Thompson, Ray,
Saz Parkinson
We note that this group is a small fraction of those interested in this topic. Agreements within this group are obviously not binding, but rather represent a starting point for discussion. In particular, any plans for publications that involve the LAT team must be approved by the LAT Principal Investigator.
Two key themes seemed to run through the meeting:
1. Need for more internal communication
2. Need for better-defined publication policy
On the question of combining the two consortia, there was no consensus, although there was agreement that the mailing lists could be combined, since there is strong overlap. In reality, the two groups are doing quite different things, so it was not clear that we gain much by combining.
There is a perception that some members of the consortia are contributing little but are still being offered the chance to sign papers. One thing we agreed on was that we should strongly encourage all participants in either timing or searching to sign papers only when they have made a significant contribution to the overall effort. This does not mean restricting to direct contribution to a given paper, but rather to the whole timing or searching effort.
We agreed also that membership in the email list does not guarantee authorship.
There was general agreement (perhaps not unanimous agreement) that the publication policy should be clarified right up front.
Before we circulate one or more draft MOU's, we agreed it would probably be worthwhile to contact all the participants in both groups to ask them what specifically they are planning in the coming year. That does not necessarily mean a list of pulsars or search regions, but some concrete proposal for how that group or individual will contribute to the overall effort. Once we know what is proposed, we can better draft the MOU(s). There may be individuals or even groups who choose to work on their own. At the same time, we should look for others who might want to join.
We agreed that the publication policy should emphasize that more papers in the coming year (although not necessarily all) will be LAT Category II papers. It should also be made clear that authorship on such papers is not automatically offered, but is determined by the lead authors. A recommendation was made for the Galactic group leads to start pushing for more pulsar papers to be Category II.
Two things that we didn't completely discuss at the meeting:
1. Galactic group leads will coordinate with the lead authors so the Cat II authorship lists are inclusive, to try to ensure LAT Team and Consortium members who have made a significant contribution to the overall effort are indeed offered the chance to sign.
2. We should emphasize that Cat II authorship order need not be alphabetical.
We discussed that continued radio timing of the brightest LAT pulsars is probably not essential, although some regular checks on the radio would be useful. One challenge from the radio group is for the LAT team to see how many of these pulsars can be timed successfully by the LAT.
An example is the 0205 pulsar in 3C58, for which Fernando has lost lock in the radio. Can it be found in the gamma-ray data, knowing the position and approximate timing information? We had three explicit examples here. The other two are J1747 and J1833.
We agreed that timing a large number of pulsars for one more year would be useful, but probably not for five years.
We agreed that the driver for any of this work should be well-defined science, not just hand-waving. Example: finding a larger sample of PWNe associated with pulsars would be useful, since the sample we have is so limited. Much of the energy loss of the neutron star is going into these. In order to find those, we need the timing to be able to look at the off-pulse emission.