Introduction

The Bordeaux group has been exercising the pulsar-related Science Tools using real and simulated data, with two goals: 1) to hunt for bugs and/or get acquainted with "features", 2) to become expert at the subtleties of pulsar timing, to help us with our twin tasks of a) centralizing the radio and X-ray timing efforts into a D4.fits ephemerides database to be used by the LAT collaboration, and b) to get a head start on the arcania we need to know to effectively phase-stack gamma photons after launch.

 We have presented our work as we've gone along. Two milestones:

In March 2007 we met with Masa, James P, et al at GSFC, which resulted in        https://jira.slac.stanford.edu/browse/PULS-31

In November 2007 we presented an update at the Collaboration Meeting at NRL, see  https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/39850/LG_EphemLightCurves.pdf?version=1 

Specifically, slide 5 of the latter is called "Limitations of the Science Tools" and evokes the concept of "expert mode" that is, trickier analyses where experienced users may be tempted to extract lists of dates from the LAT data, leave the Science Tools environment, perform their analyses with tools such as TEMPO, to then perhaps return to the Science Tools to use e.g.  gtlikelihood for phase resolved spectroscopy, etc.  

The conceptual progress we've made comes from intense discussions with the radio astronomers (see for example Report on timing discussions with S. Johnson, M. Kramer, and I. Cognard  at the 30 October 2007 Pulsar group meeting ( https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27719 ) and from the studies we've done using  Giant Radio Pulses and  XMM data on a binary pulsar (see    ).

The purpose of this page is to detail for Masa, James, et al what the limitations are, and to start a list of modifications and/or additions to the pulsar Science Tools ordered by the pain-to-gain ratio of each item.