GOALS, STRATEGIES AND FIRST DISCOVERIES OF AO327, THE ARECIBO ALL-SKY 327 MHz DRIFT PULSAR SURVEY

Abstract

We report initial results from AO327, a drift survey for pulsars with the Arecibo telescope at 327 MHz. The first phase of AO327 will cover the sky at declinations of −1• to 28• , excluding the region within 5• of the Galactic plane, where high scattering and dispersion make low-frequency surveys suboptimal. We record data from a 57 MHz bandwidth with 1024 channels and 125 µs sampling time. The 60 s transit time through the AO327 beam means that the survey is sensitive to very tight relativistic binaries even with no acceleration searches. To date we have detected 44 known pulsars with periods ranging from 3 ms to 2.21 s and discovered 24 new pulsars. The new discoveries include three millisecond pulsars, three objects with periods of a few tens of milliseconds typical of young as well as mildly recycled pulsars, a nuller, and a rotating radio transient. Five of the new discoveries are in binary systems. The second phase of AO327 will cover the sky at declinations of 28• − 38• . We compare the sensitivity and search volume of AO327 to the Green Bank North Celestial Cap survey and the GBT350 drift survey, both of which operate at 350 MHz.-2 -

The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey – VII. Timing of four millisecond pulsars and the underlying spin-period distribution of the Galactic millisecond pulsar population

“…This is shown in cumulative form in Fig. 7 where it is seen that the 95% credible region of log-normal functions we derive is broadly compatible with the present sample of 228 MSPs which have been detected in the Parkes High Time Resolution Universe Surveys (Keith et al 2010;Barr et al 2013), targeted searches of Fermi sources (Ray et al 2012) and also in surveys at lower frequencies with Arecibo and Green Bank (Deneva et al 2013;Stovall et al 2014). We note that the observed sample lies to the upper end of the 95% credible region shown in Fig.…”

Fifty years of pulsar candidate selection: from simple filters to a new principled real-time classification approach

“…Thus by 2009, summary interfaces had helped find ∼ 18.7 per cent of all PMPS pulsars illustrating the usefulness of graphical approaches. More recently, web-based candidate viewing systems incorporating similar scoring mechanisms have appeared (Cordes et al 2006;Deneva et al 2009Deneva et al , 2013. One such tool, The Pulsar Search Collaboratory (Rosen et al 2010) 4 , also incorporates human scoring via the input of high school students.…”

“…To date PEACE has been used during the Greenbank Northern Celestial Cap Survey (GBNCC, Stovall et al 2014) and the Northern High Time Resolution Universe Survey (HTRU North, Ng 2012; Barr et al 2013). Periodic and single-pulse candidates obtained during the A0327 survey (Deneva et al 2013), were similarly ranked using an algorithm based on PEACE. Over 50 participants (of varying expertise) from four universities, were then invited to view the A0327 candidates via a web-based interface.…”

Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using Alfa. Iv. Mock Spectrometer Data Analysis, Survey Sensitivity, and the Discovery of 40 Pulsars

“…Other major surveys are the HTRU-S (Keith et al 2010), HTRU-N (Barr et al 2013), and SPAN512 (Desvignes et al 2013) surveys at ∼1.4 GHz, the GBNCC (Stovall et al 2014) and AO327 drift (Deneva et al 2013) surveys at ∼350 MHz, and the LOFAR surveys (Coenen et al 2014) at ∼150 MHz.…”