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Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1(420), p. 361-368

DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.20041.x

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Profile shape stability and phase jitter analyses of millisecond pulsars

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) have been studied in detail since their discovery in 1982. The integrated pulse profiles of MSPs appear to be stable, which enables precision monitoring of the pulse times of arrival (TOAs). However, for individual pulses the shape and arrival phase can vary dramatically, which is known as pulse jitter. In this paper, we investigate the stability of integrated pulse profiles for 5 MSPs, and estimate the amount of jitter for PSR J0437-4715. We do not detect intrinsic profile shape variation based on integration times from ~10 to ~100 s with the provided instrumental sensitivity. For PSR J0437-4715 we calculate the jitter parameter to be f_J=0.067+-0.002, and demonstrate that the result is not significantly affected by instrumental TOA uncertainties. Jitter noise is also found to be independent of observing frequency and bandwidth around 1.4 GHz on frequency scales of