Cyclic Spectral Analysis of Radio Pulsars

TL;DR

This paper applies cyclic spectral analysis to pulsar radio signals, revealing phase information and enabling direct measurement of interstellar medium effects and intrinsic pulse profiles from single observations.

Contribution

It introduces cyclic spectral analysis to pulsar data, providing a novel way to analyze phase information and measure interstellar effects unlike traditional methods.

Findings

Cyclic spectrum preserves phase information of pulsar signals.

Allows direct determination of interstellar medium impulse response.

Enables extraction of intrinsic pulse profiles from single observations.

Abstract

Cyclic spectral analysis is a signal processing technique designed to deal with stochastic signals whose statistics vary periodically with time. Pulsar radio emission is a textbook example of this signal class, known as cyclostationary signals. In this paper, we discuss the application of cyclic spectral analysis methods to pulsar data, and compare the results with the traditional filterbank approaches used for almost all pulsar observations to date. In contrast to standard methods, the cyclic spectrum preserves phase information of the radio signal. This feature allows us to determine the impulse response of the interstellar medium and the intrinsic, unscattered pulse profile directly from a single observation. We illustrate these new analysis techniques using real data from an observation of the millisecond pulsar B1937+21.