Most of the advances in pulsar astronomy were due to the discovery of new objects. A major increase in search sensitivity has already started a new era of discovery at the Arecibo Observatory. This increase in search sensitivity is due first and foremost by the ALFA receiver and the pulsar surveys it makes possible, which are now being carried by the Pulsar Consortium. Preliminary estimates indicate that the Arecibo Galactic plane survey using ALFA could find many hundreds of new pulsars.
In the search for yet-undiscovered pulsars or ultra-fast spinning neutron stars, a grand-scale sky survey at the Cornell-managed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is now taking advantage of the combined processing power of personal computers around the world. The PALFA Survey, a sky survey using the Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA) -- a system of detectors with seven feeds that enables researchers to image large swaths of sky -- has joined forces with Einstein@Home, an effort based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Einstein@Home involves more than 200,000 people worldwide who donate time on their computers to search for gravitational waves from unknown pulsars.
Title: Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using ALFA. III. Probing Radio Pulsar Intermittency and Transients Authors: J. S. Deneva, J. M. Cordes, M. A. McLaughlin, D. J. Nice, D. R. Lorimer, F. Crawford, N. D. R. Bhat, F. Camilo, D. J. Champion, P. C. C. Freire, S. Edel, V. I. Kondratiev, J. W. T. Hessels, F. A. Jenet, L. Kasian, V. M. Kaspi, M. Kramer, P. Lazarus, J. van Leeuwen, S. M. Ransom, I. H. Stairs, B. W. Stappers, A. Brazier, A. Venkataraman, J. A. Zollweg
We present radio transient search algorithms, results, and statistics from the ongoing Arecibo Pulsar ALFA (PALFA) Survey of the Galactic plane. We have discovered seven objects by detecting isolated dispersed pulses and one of the new discoveries has a duty cycle of 0.01%, the smallest known. The impact of selection effects on the detectability and classification of intermittent sources is discussed, and the relative efficiencies of periodicity vs. single pulse searches are compared for various pulsar classes. We find that scintillation, off-axis detection and few rotation periods within an observation may misrepresent normal periodic pulsars as intermittent sources. Finally, we derive constraints on transient pulse rate and flux density from the PALFA survey parameters and results.