Parkes observations for project P934 semester 2016OCTS_BPSR_01

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On the smallest scales, the warm interstellar medium contains surprisingly complex structure, including extremely overdense filaments and blobs of plasma that remain intact for months, despite physical processes that should cause them to disperse on short (week) time scales. It is possible that magnetization plays a role in confining this plasma. On these AU length scales the plasma is best probed by observing the scintillations of compact background radio sources such as pulsars and quasars. Recent observations show that overdensities are confined to narrow regions along lines of sight. Over the last decade, improvements in the analysis of scintillation have enabled better characterization of these structures. These studies however have focused on the ISM in the solar-system neighbourhood and the Galactic plane. Here we propose to observe pulsars at high galactic latitudes to extend the sample lines of sight. We will determine if the scattering regions are confined to the Galactic plane or persist into the halo of the galaxy. We will also search for (or place limits on) magnetic field variations within these scattering regions and discrete structures. Our observations will also provide important constraints on the scintillation of fast radio bursts, extragalactic sources which may be magnified by the similar structures to those studied here.