Giant pulses from J1823-3021A observed with the MeerKAT telescope

TL;DR

This study reports on the detection and analysis of over 14,000 giant pulses from pulsar J1823-3021A using MeerKAT, revealing their statistical properties, polarization, and variability in rotation measure.

Contribution

First detailed characterization of giant pulses from J1823-3021A with MeerKAT, including their distribution, polarization, and RM variability, advancing understanding of pulsar emission mechanisms.

Findings

Giant pulses follow a power-law distribution with index -2.63.

Giant pulses occur independently with Poissonian waiting times.

Polarization of GPs is similar to total emission, with high RM variability.

Abstract

The millisecond pulsar J1823-3021A is a very active giant pulse emitter in the globular cluster NGC 6624. New observations with the MeerKAT radio telescope have revealed 14350 giant pulses over 5 hours of integration time, with an average wait time of about 1 second between giant pulses. The giant pulses occur in phases compatible with the ordinary radio emission, follow a power-law distribution with an index of -2.63 $\pm$ 0.02 and contribute 4 percent of the total integrated flux. The spectral index of the giant pulses follows a Gaussian distribution centered around -1.9 with a standard deviation of 0.6 and is on average flatter than the integrated emission, which has a spectral index of -2.81 $\pm$ 0.02. The waiting times between the GPs are accurately described by a Poissonian distribution, suggesting that the time of occurrence of a GP is independent from the times of occurrence of other GPs. 76 GPs show multiple peaks within the same rotation, a rate that is also compatible with the mutual independence of the GP times of occurrence. We studied the polarization properties of the giant pulses finding, on average, linear polarization only at the 1 percent level and circular polarization at the 3 percent level, similar to the polarization percentages of the total integrated emission. In 4 cases it was possible to measure the RM of the GPs which are highly variable and, in two cases, is inconsistent with the mean RM of the total integrated pulsar signal.