Timing Pulsars and Detecting Radio Transients with CHIME

In this talk, I will present results of my Ph.D. dissertation on recent observations of pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs) conducted with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, a radio transit telescope located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Kaleden, BC.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars, the remnants of massive stars following their supernova explosions. Fast Radio bursts are mysterious millisecond duration radio transients, originating from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Their origin is unknown, but they may also originate from neutron stars.

I will first discuss ongoing efforts to integrate daily cadence pulsar timing data from the CHIME/Pulsar pulsar timing backend into large-scale pulsar timing datasets used by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) to search for low frequency gravitational wave signals. The full NANOGrav array consists of approximately 70 sources; in this initial work, I present timing solutions from CHIME/Pulsar data eight sources. These initial results are promising and suggest a bright future for CHIME/Pulsar-NANOGrav data combination.

I will then discuss new pulsars and rotating radio transients (RRATs) discovered through single pulse detections by the CHIME/FRB FRB searching backend. CHIME/FRB’s daily all-sky observations are ideal for detecting sources with high levels of intermittency or transience. CHIME/Pulsar’s ability to track sources digitally allows us to follow-up initial detections with more conventional search mode observations. The combined effect has allowed us to discover and characterize seven new sources so far.

Finally, I will discuss observations conducted with the Arecibo Observatory’s 300-m single dish radio telescope, following-up low declination FRBs discovered with CHIME/FRB. This work focused on better understanding repeating FRBs by observing a small number of known repeater and some bursts with repeater-like structure in-dept. It did not result in the detection of new bursts from these sources, but it allows us to constrain the repetition rate of these sources.