Timing and Single-pulse Study of Pulsar J1909+0122 Discovered by CRAFTS

We report the discovery of PSR J1909+0122 by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope(FAST)as part of the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey.PSR J1909+0122 has a spin period of 1.257 s and a dispersion measure of 186.2 pc cm^(-3).The averaged pulse profile shows two distinct components.We performed a single-pulse study based on a one-hour observation at 1.25 GHz on 2021 August 23.We used a threshold of 5σ_(ep) to measure the nulling fraction(NF)as 63%±1.5%.The longitude-resolved fluctuation spectra and fast Fourier transform spectra of the binary sequences revealed the quasi-periodicity of nulling with a period of 30 rotation periods.We examined the reliability of the periodicity by comparing it to random noise injection.The NF,E,and modulation periodicity P_(M) of PSR J1909+0122 were compared with other periodic nulling pulsars,showing that the source of J1909+0122 has the second largest NF in the population.Long-term timing observations over six months were used to derive the phase-connected ephemeris of this pulsar.The measured P and P values disfavor dipolar geometry for polar gap models,and the prediction for a space-charge-limited flow model in the case of inverse Compton scattering is only just above the death line.In this work,PSR J1909+0122 has revealed possible correlations between nulling behavior and pulsar properties,which will help to shed light on the pulsar emission mechanism and its temporal evolution in future observations.

Pulsar candidate selection using ensemble networks for FAST drift-scan survey

The Commensal Radio Astronomy Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope(FAST) Survey(CRAFTS) utilizes the novel drift-scan commensal survey mode of FAST and can generate billions of pulsar candidate signals. The human experts are not likely to thoroughly examine these signals, and various machine sorting methods are used to aid the classification of the FAST candidates. In this study, we propose a new ensemble classification system for pulsar candidates. This system denotes the further development of the pulsar image-based classification system(PICS), which was used in the Arecibo Telescope pulsar survey, and has been retrained and customized for the FAST drift-scan survey. In this study, we designed a residual network model comprising 15 layers to replace the convolutional neural networks(CNNs) in PICS. The results of this study demonstrate that the new model can sort >96% of real pulsars to belong the top 1% of all candidates and classify >1.6 million candidates per day using a dual-GPU and 24-core computer. This increased speed and efficiency can help to facilitate real-time or quasi-real-time processing of the pulsar-search data stream obtained from CRAFTS. In addition, we have published the labeled FAST data used in this study online, which can aid in the development of new deep learning techniques for performing pulsar searches.

FAST discovery of an extremely radio-faint millisecond pulsar from the Fermi-LAT unassociated source 3FGL J0318.1+0252

High sensitivity radio searches of unassociated γ-ray sources have proven to be an effective way of finding new pulsars. Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope(FAST) during its commissioning phase, we have carried out a number of targeted deep searches of Fermi Large Area Telescope(LAT) γ-ray sources. On February 27, 2018 we discovered an isolated millisecond pulsar(MSP), PSR J0318+0253, coincident with the unassociated γ-ray source 3 FGL J0318.1+0252. PSR J0318+0253 has a spin period of 5.19 ms, a dispersion measure(DM) of 26 pc cm-3 corresponding to a DM distance of about 1.3 kpc, and a period-averaged flux density of(~11±2) μJy at L-band(1.05-1.45 GHz). Among all high energy MSPs, PSR J0318+0253 is the faintest ever detected in radio bands, by a factor of at least ~4 in terms of L-band fluxes. With the aid of the radio ephemeris, an analysis of 9.6 years of Fermi-LAT data revealed that PSR J0318+0253 also displays strong γ-ray pulsations. Follow-up observations carried out by both Arecibo and FAST suggest a likely spectral turn-over around 350 MHz. This is the first result from the collaboration between FAST and the Fermi-LAT teams as well as the first confirmed new MSP discovery by FAST, raising hopes for the detection of many more MSPs. Such discoveries will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the neutron star zoo while potentially contributing to the future detection of gravitational waves, via pulsar timing array(PTA) experiments.