Parkes observations for project P1382 semester 2025OCTS_04

The prevalence of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) in and around the Galactic center and the bulge has been one of the key questions in pulsar astronomy. In addition to finding more exotic and interesting binary systems at and around the Galactic center and bulge due to the enhanced density of stars/stellar remnants, MSPs are also proposed to be one of the candidates to explain the observed Fermi gamma-ray excess. However, most of the MSPs discovered so far are field (disk) MSPs or those in globular clusters. Initial steps towards addressing the question of Galactic center/bulge MSPs were made with the discovery of the first MSPs in a Galactic filament, but more progress comes from the discovery of a sample of MSPs around the Galactic center. Blind surveys targeting MSPs can suffer from many observational biases that smear the pulses due to binary acceleration, scattering from the enhanced density, and so on, which increases the parameter space for discovery and can sometimes make the problem intractable. However, if pulsar candidates can be identified reliably from imaging surveys, then targeted observations can make the problem tractable in identifying the pulsations. We followed up a sample of polarized sources identified in the MeerKAT bulge imaging survey and discovered a sample of 16 new MSPs. Here we request the timing observations of 8 interesting MSPs (a subset of our discovery sample), to study the binary nature of these sources and their potential inclusion in pulsar timing array efforts.