Duncan R. Lorimer

We have carried out a sensitive radio pulsar survey along the northern Galactic plane (50° < l < 60° and |b| ≲ 2°) using the Parkes 20-cm multibeam system. We observed each position for 70 min on two separate epochs. Our analyses to date have so far resulted in the detection of 32 pulsars, of which 17 were previously unknown. Here, we summarize the observations and analysis and present the timing observations of 11 pulsars and discovery parameters for a further six pulsars. We also present a timing solution for the 166-ms bursting pulsar, PSR J1938+2213, previously discovered during an Arecibo drift-scan survey. Our survey data for this pulsar show that the emission can be described by a steady pulse component with bursting emission, which lasts for typically 20–25 pulse periods, superposed. Other new discoveries are the young 80.1-ms pulsar PSR J1935+2025 which exhibits a significant amount of unmodelled low-frequency noise in its timing residuals and the 4.2-ms pulsar PSR J1935+1726 which is in a low-mass binary system with a 90.7-d circular orbit.

We present the discovery of the Vela-like radio pulsar J1856+0245 in the Arecibo PALFA survey. PSR J1856+0245 has a spin period of 81 ms, a characteristic age of 21 kyr, and a spin-down luminosity Ė = 4.6 × 10³⁶ ergs s⁻¹. It is positionally coincident with the TeV γ-ray source HESS J1857+026, which has no other known counterparts. Young, energetic pulsars create wind nebulae, and more than a dozen pulsar wind nebulae have been associated with very high energy (100 GeV-100 TeV) γ-ray sources discovered with the HESS telescope. The γ-ray emission seen from HESS J1857+026 is potentially produced by a pulsar wind nebula powered by PSR J1856+0245; faint X-ray emission detected by ASCA at the pulsar's position supports this hypothesis. The inferred γ-ray efficiency is _γ = L_γ/Ė =3.1 % (1-10 TeV, for a distance of 9 kpc), comparable to that observed in similar associations.

We review the main properties, demographics and applications of binary and millisecond radio pulsars. Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly increased in recent years, mainly due to successful surveys which have brought the known pulsar population to over 1700. There are now 80 binary and millisecond pulsars associated with the disk of our Galaxy, and a further 103 pulsars in 24 of the Galactic globular clusters. Recent highlights have been the discovery of the first ever double pulsar system and a recent flurry of discoveries in globular clusters, in particular Terzan 5.

We review the main properties, demographics and applications of binary and millisecond radio pulsars. Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly i

We present the results of a 430-MHz survey for pulsars conducted during the upgrade to the 305-m Arecibo radio telescope. Our survey covered a total of 1147 square degrees of sky using a drift-scan technique. We detected 33 pulsars, 10 of which were not known prior to the survey observations. The highlight of the new discoveries is PSR J0407+1607, which has a spin period of 25.7 ms, a characteristic age of 1.5 Gyr and is in a 1.8-yr orbit about a low-mass (>0.2 Msun) companion. The long orbital period and small eccentricity (e = 0.0009) make the binary system an important new addition to the ensemble of binary pulsars suitable to test for violations of the strong equivalence principle. We also report on our initially unsuccessful attempts to detect optically the companion to J0407+1607 which imply that its absolute visual magnitude is > 12.1. If, as expected on evolutionary grounds, the companion is an He white dwarf, our non-detection imples a cooling age of least 1 Gyr.