The Thousand-Pulsar-Array programme on MeerKAT – III. Giant pulse characteristics of PSR J0540−6919

Abstract

ABSTRACT PSR J0540−6919 is the second-most energetic radio pulsar known and resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Like the Crab pulsar, it is observed to emit giant radio pulses (GPs). We used the newly commissioned PTUSE instrument on the MeerKAT radio telescope to search for GPs across three observations. In a total integration time of 5.7 h, we detected 865 pulses above our 7σ threshold. With full polarization information for a subset of the data, we estimated the Faraday rotation measure, $\rm {RM}=-245.8 \pm 1.0$ rad m−2 towards the pulsar. The brightest of these pulses is ∼60 per cent linearly polarized but the pulse-to-pulse variability in the polarization fraction is significant. We find that the cumulative GP flux distribution follows a power-law distribution with index −2.75 ± 0.02. Although the detected GPs make up only ∼10 per cent of the mean flux, their average pulse shape is indistinguishable from the integrated pulse profile, and we postulate that, unlike in the Crab pulsar, there are no additional regular emission components. The pulses are scattered at L-band frequencies with the brightest pulse exhibiting a scattering time-scale of τ = 0.92 ± 0.02 ms at 1.2 GHz. We find several of the giants display very narrow-band flux knots similar to those seen in many Fast Radio Bursts, which we assert cannot be due to scintillation or plasma lensing. The GP time-of-arrival distribution is found to be Poissonian on all but the shortest time-scales where we find four GPs in six rotations, which if GPs are statistically independent is expected to occur in only 1 of 7000 observations equivalent to our data.