SPAN512: A new mid-latitude pulsar survey with the Nancay Radio Telescope

TL;DR

This paper introduces the SPAN512 survey using the Nancay Radio Telescope, which employs high sensitivity and resolution to discover faint, transient, and millisecond pulsars in mid-latitude regions, complementing existing surveys.

Contribution

It presents a new mid-latitude pulsar survey with enhanced sensitivity and resolution, targeting faint and transient sources more effectively than previous surveys.

Findings

Survey achieves 2x better sensitivity than HTRU

Designed to detect faint, transient, and millisecond pulsars

Complementary to existing large-scale pulsar surveys

Abstract

We present an ongoing survey with the Nan\c{c}ay Radio Telescope at L-band. The targeted area is $74^\circ \lesssim l <150^\circ$ and $3.5^\circ < |b| < 5^\circ$. This survey is characterized by a long integration time (18 min), large bandwidth (512 MHz) and high time and frequency resolution (64 $\mu$s and 0.5 MHz) giving a nominal sensitivity limit of 0.055 mJy for long period pulsars. This is about 2 times better than the mid-latitude HTRU survey, and is designed to be complementary with current large scale surveys. This survey will be more sensitive to transients (RRATs, intermittent pulsars), distant and faint millisecond pulsars as well as scintillating sources (or any other kind of radio faint sources) than all previous short-integration surveys.