Parkes observations for project P1052 semester 2020APRS_02

After five decades of study, the physics of radio wave emission and propagation in the pulsar magnetosphere remains poorly understood. This is largely due to the wide variety of dynamic phenomena observed in pulsar signals that are neither predicted nor explained by current theory, the limited window of the pulsar spectrum that previously could be studied simultaneously, and the biased sample of the pulsar population that has been studied to date. To address these limitations, we have developed pioneering statistical methods that provide new interpretive insights and enable us to study the dynamics of the radio pulsar signal on short time scales (e.g. drifting and quasi-periodic sub-pulse structure, transitions between orthogonally polarized modes of emission, nulling, etc.) even when individual pulses cannot be detected. Using our novel methods and the ultra-wide bandwidth receiver at Parkes, we will undertake a large-scale survey of pulsar radio emission statistics and explore two previously inaccessible regions where pulsar flux densities are typically much lower: the pulsar spectrum above 2 GHz, and the recycled pulsar population. Measuring the instantaneous bandwidth of impulsive emission events will yield new constraints on the physical conditions in the pulsar magnetosphere, such as the spatial scale of strong turbulence in the magnetospheric plasma. The breadth of our sample, from millisecond pulsars to magnetars, will enable us to study the evolution of emission and propagation physics over four orders of magnitude in magnetospheric size and seven orders of magnitude in magnetic field strength.