Parkes observations for project P986 semester 2018OCTS_03

Brief description

Pulsar survey is one of the top priorities of the Square Kilometer Arrays (SKA). The discovery of pulsars in relativistic binaries, pulsars in binary with black holes and pulsars in the Galactic Center (GC) will improve our understanding of gravity theories, physics of black holes and stellar population and environment in the GC region. However, conventional periodic searches for pulsars are only sensitive to strictly periodic signals with low duty cycles. Although various methods have been developed to search for pulsars in these extreme systems, it is still very challenging and computationally expensive.

One of the solutions is to find pulsar candidates in radio continuum surveys and then carry out targeted searches (e.g. Frail et al 2017). This technique allows a search over the full field of view while avoiding the need for expensive pixel-by-pixel high time resolution searches. We propose to observe 32 compact, steep spectrum candidates selected from NVSS and TGSS surveys using the Ultra-Wideband Low (UWL) receiver. The frequency coverage (as low as 700MHz) and low system temperature (~20K) of UWL will enable us to carry out a sensitive search of steep spectrum sources.