Pulsar science with data from the Large European Array for Pulsars

TL;DR

LEAP combines multiple European radio telescopes to form a highly sensitive array for pulsar observations, enabling advanced scientific studies in pulsar timing and imaging over four years.

Contribution

This paper presents the LEAP project, a novel array that enhances pulsar observation sensitivity by combining several telescopes and reports on scientific results from four years of data.

Findings

Enhanced pulsar timing precision achieved

Successful imaging of the galactic centre magnetar

Four years of valuable pulsar data collected

Abstract

The Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP) is a European Pulsar Timing Array project that combines the Lovell, Effelsberg, Nan\c{c}ay, Sardinia, and Westerbork radio telescopes into a single tied-array, and makes monthly observations of a set of millisecond pulsars (MSPs). The overview of our experiment is presented in Bassa et al. (2016). Baseband data are recorded at a central frequency of 1396 MHz and a bandwidth of 128 MHz at each telescope, and are correlated offline on a cluster at Jodrell Bank Observatory using a purpose-built correlator, detailed in Smits et al. (2017). LEAP offers a substantial increase in sensitivity over that of the individual telescopes, and can operate in timing and imaging modes (notably in observations of the galactic centre radio magnetar; Wucknitz 2015). To date, 4 years of observations have been reduced. Here, we report on the scientific projects which have made use of LEAP data.