A Comparison of the Four Algorithms of Ensemble Pulsar Time

Abstract

The pulsar time defined by a single pulsar is affected by many kinds of noise sources. Its short-term and long-term degrees of stability are both not good enough. In order to weaken the influence of these noise sources on the single pulsar time, an appropriate algorithm can be adopted to make a synthesis of many single pulsar times, then the ensemble pulsar time is obtained, thereby increasing the long-term degree of stability of the ensemble pulsar time. In this article four kinds of algorithms of the ensemble pulsar time are introduced, i.e., the classical weighting algorithm, wavelet analysis algorithm, Wiener filtering algorithm and Wiener filtering algorithm in wavelet domain. These four algorithms are respectively applied to the timing residuals obtained from the observation of two millisecond pulsars, PSR B1855+09 and PSR B1937+21 made at the Arecibo Astronomical Observatory, and comparisons are carried out.