Parkes observations for project P778 semester 2012OCTS

Full description

We request time for keeping on performing a deeper than ever search for millisecond pulsars in a subset of promising (as far as pulsar content) globular clusters in the southern sky. This search will exploit the new back-ends (APSR and DFB3/DFB4) now available at Parkes and will be complementary to the survey running at GBT (i.e. it will look at clusters outside the portion of sky suitable for deep GBT pointings). The discovery of millisecond pulsars in the selected sample of clusters (i) will lead to put unique constraints on the properties of the stellar systems which harbour them, (ii) will be complementary to the study of the gamma-ray emission from those clusters (performed by the Fermi satellite), (iii) can lead to the discovery of few eccentric massive millisecond pulsar binaries (the most promising targets for constraining the Equation of State of the nuclear matter) and (iv) might unveil the presence of exotic binaries whose formation is possible only in the dense stellar environment of a globular cluster.