A single pulse study of PSR J1752+2359

Abstract

The single pulse observation of PSR J1752+2359 at 1250 MHz made using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is presented. We show that the pulsar exhibits two distinct emission states: a normal state with continuous normal pulse emission and a rotating radio transient (RRAT)-like state with sporadic emission. This makes PSR J1752+2359 the third pulsar that exhibits switching between RRAT-like and pulsar-like states. Our data show that, during the observation, 20 per cent of the time for this pulsar was in the normal state and 80 per cent in the RRAT-like state. A quasi-periodic switching, with a periodicity of around 568 spin periods, between the two states was observed. The pulse energies for the two states both follow log-normal distributions. We demonstrate that the polarization profiles and the linear polarization position angle (PA) swings differ significantly between the two states. There is a phase offset of about 0°.35 between the pulse profile peaks of the two states. We argue that the emission geometry in the magnetosphere may be different for the two states.