Individual subpulses of PSR B1916+14 and their polarization properties

Abstract

ABSTRACT The individual subpulses of pulsars are regarded as their basic emission components, providing invaluable information for our understanding of the radio emission process in the pulsar magnetosphere. Nevertheless, subpulses are overlapped with each other along the rotation phase for most pulsars, making it difficult to study the statistical properties of subpulses. Among the pulsars observed by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), PSR B1916+14 has a large number of isolated well-resolved subpulses in the high-time-resolution observations, having a typical width of 0.15 ms and a high linear polarization. We find that the number distribution of subpulses contributes dominantly to the mean profile. According to the emission geometry, these emission units come from a region roughly 155 km above the polar cap in the pulsar magnetosphere, and the length-scale of the basic emission units is approximately 120 m. The deviations of the polarization position angles for these single subpulses from the standard S-shaped curve are closely related to their fractional linear and circular polarization, and the large deviations tend to come from drifting subpulses.