Finding pulsars with LOFAR

TL;DR

This paper explores LOFAR's potential to discover new pulsars through various survey strategies, predicting hundreds of new detections in the Galaxy, globular clusters, and nearby galaxies, including extragalactic pulsars.

Contribution

It presents detailed predictions for pulsar discoveries with LOFAR, including survey strategies and sensitivity estimates for different astrophysical targets.

Findings

A 25-day all-sky survey could find ~900 new pulsars.

LOFAR can detect low luminosity millisecond pulsars in globular clusters.

Extragalactic giant pulses can be observed up to over 1 Mpc.

Abstract

We investigate the number and type of pulsars that will be discovered with the low-frequency radio telescope LOFAR. We consider different search strategies for the Galaxy, for globular clusters and for other galaxies. We show that a 25-day all-sky Galactic survey can find approximately 900 new pulsars, probing the local pulsar population to a deep luminosity limit. For targets of smaller angular size such as globular clusters and galaxies many LOFAR stations can be combined coherently, to make use of the full sensitivity. Searches of nearby northern-sky globular clusters can find new low luminosity millisecond pulsars. Giant pulses from Crab-like extragalactic pulsars can be detected out to over a Mpc.