The High Time Resolution Universe: The latest survey for pulsars at Parkes

摘要

The High Time Resolution Universe survey for radio pulsars and transients is the largest such survey yet undertaken with the Parkes radio telescope. We use the 13-beam multibeam receiver centred at 1352 MHz, connected to BPSR, our new all-digital backend. This system provides us with 340 MHz of usable band split into 870 channels, each sampled with two bits every 64 (mu)s. The factor of eight improvement in frequency resolution over previous Parkes multibeam surveys allows us to probe further into the galactic plane for short duration signals, such as those from fast transients and millisecond pulsars. The survey is split into low, mid and high Galactic latitude regions, each covered with integration times of 4300, 540 and 270 s respectively. To date we have almost completed the mid latitude survey, discovering 65 previously unknown pulsars, including 15 millisecond pulsars. Upon completion we expect to discover some 400 pulsars, of which 75 will be millisecond pulsars.