Preamble

• Before the first year on orbit, we wrote a Pulsar Timing Consortium Memo of Understandingfor sustained timing of known pulsars with Edot > 1E34 erg/s. This acquired two appendices:

1. to add the radio observatory at Urumqi in China
2. to add Ben Stappers to the list, after he moved to the U. of Manchester and took on Jodrell Bank duties from Lyne & Kramer.

• During the first year, Paul Ray put together a Pulsar Search Consortium (=PSC), described in this document.
• These documents expired at the end of Year 1. The purpose of this page is to update them.

Our intent is to merge the "Consortium" and the "PSC" into one single body, if practical.

Two broad issues need to be addressed --

1. Observation strategies
2. Publication policy

Observation strategies

We'll consider two aspects separately --

1. Monitoring of known radio (and X-ray) pulsars.
2. Follow-ups of LAT sources (blind search pulsars, and unidentified DC sources)

( Only 5 X-ray pulsars are covered by the original MoU and involve a small number of people (2 at McGill, 1 at GSFC, 1 at Columbia). We'll deal with these individually once we've covered the thornier issues. )

Monitoring of known radio pulsars

The situation is shaping up nicely. Here is a message I sent to Simon Johnston:

Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:27:40 +0200 (CEST)
From: D.A. Smith <smith@cenbg.in2p3.fr>
To: simon.johnston@atnf.csiro.au
Subject: radio timing after Lucas, Damien, Patrick...

Life after Lucas, Damien, Patrick doesn't seem too grim to me.

Damien is not a .par producer, only a user. He'll be a postdoc in the group with Paul Ray at NRL and will continue doing alot of what he's been doing. (He wants to learn how to build LAT .par's with Paul!).

Lucas will continue building Nancay .par's from Bonn. What's better is that he'll be sitting near Aris, who has been doing them for Jodrell! Lucas' dream is that he and Aris combine TOA's and share the work load.

Patrick is now part of the Jodrell effort. Could Patrick continue to build .pars for Parkes? Maybe not. Could Patrick dump Parkes TOAs on Aris and Lucas, for them to include in the .par fabrication machine? Maybe.

So that leaves two big Parkes tasks in the lurch:
i) actually driving out to telescope and staying up all night ;
ii) reducing Parkes raw data to TOAs that could be fed to Lucas and Aris

Certainly Lucas is very enthusiastic about the idea we discussed on the phone last time, that he come to Sydney for a month, to observe and to learn more of the radio trade. Michael K certainly wants Lucas to become a "real" radio astronomer. So... Lucas can chip into (ii) once he returns from Australia, in <6 months maybe.

For i, you said that you would offload your northern Fermi targets (to the friends mentioned above!) and then spread the remainder amongst other Parkes observing campaigns, such that you'd end up with one night every three months instead of two nights every month.

And here is what Simon answered:

Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:51:20 +1000 (EST)
From: Simon Johnston <Simon.Johnston@atnf.csiro.au>
To: D.A. Smith <smith@cenbg.in2p3.fr>
Subject: Re: radio timing after Lucas, Damien, Patrick...

Sounds good to combine timing and searching together. Agree.

Onto the data reduction. Patrick has this mostly automated (apart from flagging of bad data) and I think I understand how to drive it all. So I can certainly produce TOAs in a finite time after the observing. However this still leaves the actual timing itself and this is complicated, time consuming and fairly manual given glitches, timing noise, multi-freqs etc etc. I'm not sure I'll have time to do this so your suggestion of a central clearing house in Bonn sounds like a very good one. Plus it has the advantage of being able to combine TOAs from the different telescopes. I could send Aris/Lucas the TOAs and they could do the actual timing. As long as they (and Michael) are keen on this that would be great.

This brings us back to rationalising the timing list at Parkes. In some ways given you have to trek out to Parkes anyway, observing for 24 hours rather than 12 makes little difference. However shorter observing does make it possible to tack the timing onto other programs and then persuading the observers to spend an extra day there. Also (a) we could cut northern sources, (b) for some sources with low timing noise 1 month is overkill and (c) are all these sources worth doing anyway??? We have until Dec 15 to decide (next obs deadline) and by then we'll know about whether we'll be getting a good postdoc or not. Affaire a suivre as they say in France.

I propose next to a) make sure that DJT, RWR, and PSR are on-board with what I'm doing and then b) talk to Michael Kramer. We have touched on these topics in the past and my impression is that he'll be good with it. But it's time to clarify.

Note that the Americans not timing large numbers of pulsars. Only the six at GBT from the MoU, to a good first approximation. We certainly want Fernando to keep pounding away at PSR J1930+1852 (the only one of the six that we haven't yet seen in gamma-rays) as well as any others he wants to do with us (e.g. PSR J1935+2025 that is a good candidate but not covered by the MoU).

But my inclination is: let the australo-europeans agree on how to track the hundreds and hundreds of pulsars. I expect the Americans to be glad to hear it, and they will then see how to further coordinate with that. (Example: we have seen that large numbers of lower-resolution TOA's sometimes compliment small numbers of GBT-quality TOAs for an overall better timing solution.)

How many radio pulsars do we want to monitor?

I feel strongly that it is too early to start abandoning large numbers of pulsars, and that we easily have the resources to monitor them anyway.

• Jodrell Bank seems committed to following all of the northern ones independently of us anyway
• With the Bonn central clearing house, it looks like the overlap between the australo-european telescopes is going to get rationalized ==> less telescope time for the same number of pulsars
• The doubling time for LAT datasets is still << than the mission lifetime, and we are no where near having unlocked the secrets that we ambition to address in the 2nd Pulsar Catalog.
• Let's keep going!

This said... LAT pulsar timing allows us to stop or slow the radio monitoring of the "important but ridiculously difficult" ones. Certainly PSR J1124-5916. Paul, can you time PSR J0205+6449? So again, we can economize precious GBT time if we want.

We'll also try to leverage the NRL/Bonn connection (my two students!) to see which Parkes sources Simon can back off on.