Abstract Details

Name: Bhaswati Bhattacharyya
Affiliation: NCRA
Conference ID: ASI2020_127
Title : Challenges in neutron star laboratories
Authors and Co-Authors : Bhaswati Bhattacharyya
Abstract Type : Invited
Abstract Category : Plenary
Abstract : Neutron stars act as efficient laboratories to study physics of matter at extreme state. We will present ongoing research in the fields of, i) targeted and blind surveys of pulsars and transients looking for such laboratories with varied properties, ii) high precision timing of the extremely stable millisecond pulsars proving gravity, iii) long term timing of rotating radio transients probing their relation with rest of the neutron star population, iv) investigation of single pulse properties of newly discovered pulsars probing the pulse emission mechanism from the highly magnetised neutron stars, and v) results from multi frequency investigation of eclipse properties of the millisecond pulsars in special evolutionary state probing the intra-binary material. In-spite of persistent efforts for last five decades, presently known population of pulsars is only about 5% of the total Galactic population of pulsars (estimates of Galactic population ranges from 40,000 to 90,000 objects), indicating that a vast majority of pulsars are waiting to be discovered. Being the largest array telescope, the GMRT is having the potential to undertake sensitive pulsar searches which we explored while conducting targeted and blind searches for pulsars and transients with the GMRT. We discovered 7 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) in the Fermi directed searches, which are the first Galactic MSPs discovered with the GMRT. Discovery of the third transitional MSP J1227-4853 showing transition from Low mass X-ray binary to radio pulsar state will be presented. We will also present 19 discoveries (including two MSPs, two mildly recycled pulsars, one pulsar with gamma-ray pulsation and the first rotating radio transient with the GMRT) from the GMRT High Resolution Southern Sky (GHRSS) survey, which is an off-Galactic-plane survey. The simultaneous time-domain and imaging study for localising pulsars and transients and efficient candidate investigation with machine learning are some of the features of the GHRSS survey.