The Green Bank Telescope Pulsar Spigot

We describe the design, implementation, and usage of a new facility pulsar search and timing instrument for the 100 m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). This instrument, known as the Pulsar Spigot, makes use of the extremely flexible digital correlator at the GBT to perform rapid autocorrelations ( as fast as 2.56 mu s) across wide bandwidths ( up to 800 MHz) with large numbers of lags ( up to 4096), using as many as four simultaneous frequency bands. Successful observations using this instrument have been conducted over the past year and have already resulted in a number of newly discovered pulsars and detailed studies of individual pulsars.