Radio pulsar – Master – MERATE (LC) – Apply interplanetary scintillation tomography in Pulsar Timing Arrays – Tiburzi.

The topic of this thesis project are radio pulsars, that are fast-rotating, highly-magnetised neutron stars generating beams of emission located at the magnetic poles of the stars. As the neutron star rotates, these beams sweep the space and they can be seen by an observer on Earth as a periodic source of radiation — very similarly to cosmic lighthouses.

Scope of the thesis: pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) are experiments were arrays of pulsars are used to search for low-frequency gravitational waves coming from coalescing supermassive black-hole binaries. One of the main issues in PTA experiments is the large number of signals that can compete with gravitational waves and prevent their detection. One of such signals is the effect that the Solar wind has on the pulsar radio emission (the most widely used in PTAs).
The Solar wind is a highly variable and dynamic environment of free electrons that fill the heliosphere, and it is hard to model in the traditional ways other ‘noises’ were in PTAs. In this project we apply techniques and results coming from the Space weather science, such as interplanetary scintillation tomography, to attempt the most optimal correction for the Solar wind effects.

[Credit image: NASA]