Development and use of next generation pulsar timing systems

Pulsars are named for the periodic pulse of electromagnetic energy we detect from point sources in the sky and are considered exceptionally good, but not perfect, cosmic clocks. We use sensitive radio telescopes to measure pulse time-of-arrivals (ToAs) and construct pulsar timing models containing rotational, astrometric and stellar binary system parameters. Pulsar timing compares measured ToAs with the predictions from the model and analysing the differences can provide insights into a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. The key instrument in pulsar observations is the Pulsar Timing System (PTS) and in this thesis we describe our development of two new pulsar timing systems. The first is a robust, low cost, next generation system using consumer grade GPUs as the compute engine and we have instruments installed in Ghana and at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK. We consider the apparent relationship between pulsar characteristic age and spectral index and we seek to make pulsar flux density measurements at 5GHz and 6.7GHz (in C-band) using the AVN radio telescope at Kuntunse in Ghana to explore this relationship further. We also consider searching for pulsars in the Galactic centre region where the potential benefits of using pulsars to probe the region and SgrA* would be very significant. Our second pulsar timing system combines the observations from the six medium sized, geographically dispersed, e-MERLIN telescopes into a single incoherent beam providing increased sensitivity to pulsar signals. We are making pulsar timing observations of eight pulsars that exhibit transient behaviour in the form of glitches (a sudden increase in the rate of rotation) or mode-switching (changes to the pulse profile). The e-MERLIN facility now offers a 'Pulsar LOFT-e Mode' as an option for external researchers based on our work on this PTS.