Australia Telescope Compact Array observations for project C3707 semester 2025OCTS

The nature and origin of sources within the growing population of so-called "long period radio transients" (LPTs) is the subject of recent debate in the literature. These sources exhibit many of the hallmarks of pulsar radio emission, leading to suggestions of a neutron-star origin and a pulsar-like emission mechanism. However, the pulse periods and widths are orders of magnitudes longer than those of canonical pulsars, with periods ranging from minutes to several hours. The extraordinarily bright emission from these sources (peak flux densities ranging from hundreds of mJy to tens of Jy) therefore poses stern challenges to conventional pulsar radio emission models, which require a rapidly-rotating magnetic fields to sustain electron-positron pair production that feeds the observed emission. In this proposal, we seek to carry out regular monitoring of a sample of LPTs with the ATCA, with the aims of studying the spectro-polarimetric properties of the emission in detail, and constraining long-term rotational properties through regular timing. These observables will greatly improve constraints on the physical nature of these objects and their emission environment, leading to improved understanding of their nature and origin. New insights from this programme may have broad-reaching implications into the operation of radio emission from relativistic magnetized plasmas, as found in pulsars, magnetars, and in fast radio bursts.