Search for radio pulsars in supernova remnants

Abstract

The association of pulsars and supernova remnants has been an intriguing question even after decades of research. The search for pulsars in a supernova remnant is not always successful due to the uncertainties in the position of the pulsar. However, the discovery of a pulsar in a supernova remnant opens up new avenues of research. In this project, five supernova remnants were searched for radio pulsars with the Green Bank Telescope at 820 MHz with a bandwidth of 200 MHz. The data was processed with the help of the pulsar search software, PRESTO, developed by Ransom et al. (2002) up to a dispersion measure of 2000 pc cm^ −3 with a step size of 0.3. Due to time constraints on data processing we were able to search the remnants for isolated pulsars only. All candidates with a high sigma value were folded and analysed. Further analysis was also done with the help of plots and individual folding of candidates at respective dispersion measures and period. No new pulsars were detected in the survey. However, we were able to redetect J2047+5029. We were unable to detect the other known pulsars in the field of view of our survey. We calculated the flux density limits for the known pulsars in our field of view and compared it with the known flux density limits. We also calculated the flux density limits and compared its sensitivity with the known sensitivities of the remnants from previous surveys. We also discuss the reasons for the non-detection of a pulsar in the studied supernova remnants. We aim to perform an acceleration search on the data in order to make the survey sensitive to binary pulsar in the future.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Smith (Supervisor) & Rene Breton (Supervisor)