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Session 111 - Pulsars.
Display session, Saturday, January 10
Exhibit Hall,
We are conducting a high frequency, wide bandwidth (1280--1430 MHz) Galactic plane survey for pulsars using the 40\times200 m radio telescope at Nançay, France. The search will cover up to 1170 square degrees of sky within 3 degrees of the Galactic plane from longitudes -15^\circ \le \ell \le 180^\circ and is optimized for finding young and distant pulsars with milliJansky sensitivity to periods as short as the theoretical break-up speed of a neutron star (0.5 ms). Data is being acquired with our new 96 channel filterbank spectrometer, the Navy-Berkeley Pulsar Processor (NBPP), which was designed and built at the Naval Research Laboratory in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley specifically for the Nançay survey. Data are collected at dual polarizations, sampling each of the 96 channels at a rate of 60 \mus. Data values are digitized to 4-bits, packed, and written to dual 8-mm tape drives for off-line analysis. The data processing is being performed on a variety of concurrent computers both parallel supercomputers and distributed workstation networks.
More than half of the observations have been completed and the analysis efforts are also well underway. We have developed code that automates 95% of the processing for the expected 4 terra-byte data set. Due to the prevalence of radio frequency interference in the data, we have also developed software capable of detecting and extracting the man made signals that can mask pulsar emissions. Here we discuss our survey sensitivity to fast pulsars in the context of previous simalar high frequency surveys and show the latest analysis results.
