The Swinburne intermediate-latitude pulsar survey

Abstract

We have conducted a survey of intermediate Galactic latitudes using the 13-beam 21-cm multibeam receiver of the Parkes 64-m radio telescope. The survey covered the region enclosed by 5 deg < |b| < 15 deg and -100 deg < l < 50 deg with 4,702 processed pointings of 265 s each, for a total of 14.5 days of integration time. Thirteen 2x96-channel filterbanks provided 288 MHz of bandwidth at a centre frequency of 1374 MHz, one-bit sampled every 125 microsec and incurring ~DM/13.4 cm^-3 pc samples of dispersion smearing. The system was sensitive to slow and most millisecond pulsars in the region with flux densities greater than approximately 0.3--1.1 mJy. Offline analysis on the 64-node Swinburne workstation cluster resulted in the detection of 170 pulsars of which 69 were new discoveries. Eight of the new pulsars, by virtue of their small spin periods and period derivatives, may be recycled and have been reported elsewhere. The slow pulsars discovered are typical of those already known in the volume searched, being of intermediate to old age. Several pulsars experience pulse nulling and two display very regular drifting sub-pulses. We discuss the new discoveries and provide timing parameters for the 48 slow pulsars for which we have a phase-connnected solution.