Assessment of a statistical approach that facilitates the constraint of pulsar geometry via dualband light curve fitting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new statistical method for fitting pulsar light curves across radio and gamma-ray data to better constrain pulsar geometry, improving upon previous eye-based and other statistical approaches.

Contribution

It develops a novel test statistic for dual-band light curve fitting and applies it to 16 pulsars, providing refined geometrical constraints.

Findings

Geometrical constraints on pulsars were obtained using the new method.

The new approach offers improved accuracy over previous eye-based and statistical methods.

Results demonstrate consistency and potential advantages of the developed test statistic.

Abstract

The Large Area Telescope aboard the Fermi spacecraft has detected more than 200 $\gamma$-ray pulsars since its launch in 2008. By concurrently fitting standard geometric model light curves onto Fermi and radio data, researchers have constrained the inclination and observer angles of a number of pulsars. At first this was done by comparing observed and modelled light curves by eye, and later via statistical approaches. We fit modelled light curves of 16 pulsars to radio and $\gamma$-ray data by optimising a custom test statistic that we have developed for combining light curves across the two wavebands, taking their disparate errors into account. We present geometrical constraints found using this process, and compare them with results found by eye or using other statistical methods.