Frequency-dependent Template Profiles for High-precision Pulsar Timing

Abstract

Abstract Pulsar timing experiments require high-fidelity template profiles in order to minimize the biases in pulse time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements and their uncertainties. Efforts to acquire more precise TOAs given the fixed effective area of telescopes, finite receiver noise, and limited integration time have led pulsar astronomers to the solution of implementing ultra-wideband receivers. This solution, however, has run up against the problem that pulse profile shapes evolve with frequency, which raises the question of how to properly measure and analyze TOAs obtained using template-matching methods. This paper proposes a new method for one facet of this problem, that of template profile generation, and demonstrates it on the well-timed millisecond pulsar J1713+0747. Specifically, we decompose pulse profile evolution into a linear combination of basis eigenvectors, the coefficients of which change slowly with frequency such that their evolution is modeled simply by a sum of low-degree piecewise polynomial spline functions. These noise-free, high-fidelity, frequency-dependent templates can be used to make measurements of so-called “wideband TOAs” simultaneously with an estimate of the instantaneous dispersion measure. The use of wideband TOAs is becoming important for pulsar timing array experiments, as the volume of data sets comprised of conventional, subbanded TOAs are quickly becoming unwieldy for the Bayesian analyses needed to uncover latent gravitational wave signals. Although motivated by high-precision timing experiments, our technique is applicable in more general pulsar observations.