pinta: The uGMRT Data Processing Pipeline for the Indian Pulsar Timing Array

TL;DR

The paper presents 'pinta', a data processing pipeline for the uGMRT, enabling high-precision pulsar timing crucial for the Indian Pulsar Timing Array, with detailed workflow, performance analysis, and novel timing offset determination.

Contribution

Introduces 'pinta', a comprehensive pipeline for reducing uGMRT pulsar data, including novel methods for timing offset measurement and validation with high-precision TOA generation.

Findings

Effective RFI mitigation demonstrated.

Accurate determination of relative time offsets.

Successful high-precision TOA generation for pulsar timing.

Abstract

We introduce pinta, a pipeline for reducing the upgraded Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) raw pulsar timing data, developed for the Indian Pulsar Timing Array experiment. We provide a detailed description of the workflow and usage of pinta, as well as its computational performance and RFI mitigation characteristics. We also discuss a novel and independent determination of the relative time offsets between the different back-end modes of uGMRT and the interpretation of the uGMRT observation frequency settings, and their agreement with results obtained from engineering tests. Further, we demonstrate the capability of pinta to generate data products which can produce high-precision TOAs using PSR J1909-3744 as an example. These results are crucial for performing precision pulsar timing with the uGMRT.