Parkes observations for project P1050 semester 2020OCTS_05

Brief description

This is a request for observing time for the timing campaign of new pulsar discoveries and follow-up of expected new potential pulsars from the re-processing of the low-latitude Galactic plane section of the HTRU survey (P630). We have now completed the first pass re-processing of the 62 % of the survey with GPU based coherent acceleration search and template bank search pipelines, and have discovered 51 previously unknown pulsars.
Interesting science can usually only be derived from a new pulsar after confirmation and a follow-up timing campaign is carried out. One year of initial timing is the minimum timespan required to fully characterise any newly-discovered pulsars, essential for deriving pulsar parameters such as the characteristic age, magnetic field strength, spin-down rate, as well as to detect any unexpected behaviour of the pulsar which might result from emission instabilities. This timing project is necessary for following up on any interesting pulsar systems discovered from the HTRU Galactic plane survey. Since all of the pulsars on the observing list here have been confirmed in the current 2020APRS semester, the follow-up timing will produce completely new and exciting results. In addition, this timing project will enable a large-scale examination of the Galactic plane pulsar population, exploring the true boundaries of pulsar parameter space in the galactic plane.