Profile-shape stability and phase-jitter analyses of millisecond pulsars

Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) have been studied in detail since their discovery in 1982. The integrated pulse profiles of MSPs appear to be stable, which enables precision monitoring of the pulse times of arrival (TOAs). However, for individual pulses the shape and arrival phase can vary dramatically; this is known as pulse jitter. In this paper, we investigate the stability of integrated pulse profiles for five MSPs and estimate the amount of jitter for PSRJ0437-4715. We do not detect intrinsic profile-shape variation based on integration times from ∼10-100s with the provided instrumental sensitivity. For PSRJ0437-4715, we calculate the jitter parameter to be f J= 0.067 ± 0.002 and demonstrate that the result is not significantly affected by instrumental TOA uncertainties. Jitter noise is also found to be independent of observing frequency and bandwidth around 1.4GHz on frequency scales of