An interference removal technique for radio pulsar searches

Abstract

Searches for radio pulsars are becoming increasingly difficult because of a rise in impulsive man-made terrestrial radio-frequency interference. Here, we present a new technique, zero dispersion measure filtering, which can significantly reduce the effects of such signals in pulsar search data. The technique has already been applied to a small portion of the data from the Parkes multi-beam pulsar survey, resulting in the discovery of four new pulsars, so illustrating its efficacy.