Pulsar Timing Models
The lecture provides an introduction to pulsar timing by Ryan Shannon. It first introduces the concepts of folding and pulse time tagging. It then describes the physical processes that impact the timing model, including both deterministic and statistical processes, including both white and red-noise like statistical processes. The lecture then describes inference methods applied to pulsar timing, introducing the formats of arrival time and pulsar ephemeris files commonly used in pulsar timing. The lecture describes some of the features of tempo2, a program commonly used to model arrival time. It then describes how Bayesian methodology can be applied in pulsar timing analysis. The lecture concludes with tips and best practices when undertaking pulsar timing analysis.
The lecture is followed by tempo2 and temponest tutorial exercises led by Aditya Parthasarathy. The material for the tutorials can be viewed under the Materials tab.
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Exercises
The data and exercises for all workshop lectures can be downloaded (and extracted) to the shared directory in your virtual machine as described here.
Tempo2 tutorial exercise
The tempo2 tutorial exercise teaches students how to analyse pulsar timing residuals from which we can learn how accurately we are able to predict the arrival times of a pulsar’s pulses. In particular, it also teaches students how to fit for a glitch in a pulsar’s timing residuals.
The tutorial instructions are contained in TEMPO2_AP.pdf and can be found in the downloaded directory, /home/pulsar/SHARE/exercises/lec6_pulsar_timing_models, on your virtual machine. The tutorial relies on data within the PulsarTiming directory in lec6_pulsar_timing_models.
Temponest tutorial exercise
In this temponest tutorial exercise students are taught how to use a Bayesian analysis software called temponest to model timing noise in pulsar timing experiments.
The tutorial instructions are contained in TempoNest_AP.pdf and can be found in the downloaded directory, /home/pulsar/SHARE/exercises/lec6_pulsar_timing_models, on your virtual machine. The tutorial relies on data and files within the PulsarTiming/TempoNest directory in lec6_pulsar_timing_models.
