The GMRT High Resolution Southern Sky Survey for Pulsars and Transients. IV. Discovery of Four New Pulsars with an FFA Search

Abstract

The fast Fourier transform (FFT) based periodicity search methods provide an efficient way to search for millisecond and binary pulsars but encounter significant sensitivity degradation while searching for long period and short duty cycle pulsars. An alternative to FFT-based search methods called the fast folding algorithm (FFA) search provides superior sensitivity to search for signals with long periods and short duty cycles. In the GMRT High Resolution Southern Sky (GHRSS) survey, we are using an FFA-based pipeline to search for isolated pulsars in a period range of 100 ms to 100 s. We have processed 2800 degree ^2 of the sky coverage away from the Galactic plane and discovered six new pulsars. Here, we report the discovery of four of these pulsars with the FFA search pipeline. This includes a narrow duty cycle pulsar, J1936−30, which shows nulling behavior with an extreme nulling fraction of ∼90%. Two of the GHRSS discoveries from the FFA search lie in narrow duty cycle ranges beyond the limit of the existing population. The implementation of FFA search in the GHRSS survey and other pulsar surveys is expected to recover the missing population of long period and short duty cycle pulsars.

Keywords

• Neutron stars
• Radio pulsars
• Observational astronomy