Application of Efron-Petrosian method to radio pulsar fluxes

TL;DR

This paper applies the Efron-Petrosian method to analyze radio pulsar fluxes, revealing that survey inhomogeneity affects the independence of luminosity and distance, but more homogeneous data shows flux consistent with certain distance exponents.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of the Efron-Petrosian technique to pulsar data and highlights the importance of data homogeneity for reliable analysis.

Findings

Survey inhomogeneity affects luminosity-distance independence.

More homogeneous data shows flux consistent with distance exponents 1.5 and 2.0.

Efron-Petrosian method's effectiveness depends on data quality.

Abstract

We apply the Efron-Petrosian technique to radio fluxes of pulsars detected in the Parkes multi-beam survey to test the independence of luminosity and distance. For this dataset, we find that for four different distance exponents (ranging from 0.5 to 2), the flux thresholds at which the luminosity and distances are uncorrelated, correspond to very low $p$-values for the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test between the truncated and untruncated datasets. This is due to the fact that the Parkes multi-beam survey is not sufficiently homogeneous to lend itself to a treatment by the Efron-Petrosian method. We then repeat the analysis after rendering the dataset more homogeneous by excluding the distant pulsars from this sample. We find that for this culled dataset, the flux is consistent with distance exponents of 1.5 and 2.0.