Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 812, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/812/1/81
Keywords
methods: data analysis; pulsars: general
Categories
Funding
- CANARIE NEP-2 grant
- Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI)
- NanoQuebec
- RMGA
- Fonds de recherche du Quebec-Nature et technologies (FRQ-NT)
- NSF [PHY 1104617]
- NSERC Discovery Grant and Accelerator Supplement
- Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Quebec
- R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellowship from the Canadian Institute
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology
- European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP)/ERC Grant [337062]
- European Research Council for the ERC Starting Grant BEACON [279702]
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- NSERC Discovery Grant and Discovery Accelerator Supplement
- Chief of Naval Research
- National Science Foundation [AST-1100968]
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Physics [1104902, 1104617] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Physics
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1430284, 0955929] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Office Of The Director
- Office of Integrative Activities [1458952] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/L000768/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- STFC [ST/L000768/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The on-going Arecibo Pulsar-ALFA (PALFA) survey began in 2004 and is searching for radio pulsars in the Galactic plane at 1.4 GHz. Here we present a comprehensive description of one of its main data reduction pipelines that is based on the PRESTO software and includes new interference-excision algorithms and candidate selection heuristics. This pipeline has been used to discover 40 pulsars, bringing the survey's discovery total to 144 pulsars. Of the new discoveries, eight are millisecond pulsars (MSPs; P < 10 ms) and one is a Fast Radio Burst (FRB). This pipeline has also re-detected 188 previously known pulsars, 60 of them previously discovered by the other PALFA pipelines. We present a novel method for determining the survey sensitivity that accurately takes into account the effects of interference and red noise: we inject synthetic pulsar signals with various parameters into real survey observations and then attempt to recover them with our pipeline. We find that the PALFA survey achieves the sensitivity to MSPs predicted by theoretical models but suffers a degradation for P. 100 ms that gradually becomes up to similar to 10 times worse for P > 4 s at DM < 150 pc cm(-3). We estimate 33 +/- 3% of the slower pulsars are missed, largely due to red noise. A population synthesis analysis using the sensitivity limits we measured suggests the PALFA survey should have found 224 +/- 16 un-recycled pulsars in the data set analyzed, in agreement with the 241 actually detected. The reduced sensitivity could have implications on estimates of the number of long-period pulsars in the Galaxy.
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