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Radio pulsar sub-populations (I): The curious case of nulling pulsars

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Abstract

About \(\sim \)200 radio pulsars have been observed to exhibit nulling episodes – short and long. We find that the nulling fraction of a pulsar does not have any obvious correlation with any of the intrinsic pulsar parameters. It also appears that the phenomenon of nulling may be preferentially experienced by pulsars with emission coming predominantly from the polar cap region, and also having extremely curved magnetic fields.

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Acknowledgements

Most of this work had been carried out when SK was supported by a Grant (SR/WOS-A/PM-1038/2014) from DST, Government of India and UD was supported through the ‘Indian Academies’ Summer Research Fellowship Programme (2017)’. Work done by Devansh Agarwal (also as a part of another summer project) has been useful in sorting out certain preliminary issues. SK would also like to thank Avinash Deshpande, Yashwant Gupta, Vishal Gajjar and Bhal Chandra Joshi for helpful discussions. We also thank the anonymous referee for helping to improve the clarity of the manuscript significantly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NCRA-TIFR, Pune, 411007, India

    Sushan Konar

  2. Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110007, India

    Uddeepta Deka

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  1. Sushan Konar
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  2. Uddeepta Deka
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Correspondence to Sushan Konar.

Appendix. Nulling pulsar parameters

Appendix. Nulling pulsar parameters

Table 2 Characteristic parameters - spin-period (\(\hbox {P}_\mathrm{s}\)), surface magnetic field (\(\hbox {B}_\mathrm{s}\)) and nulling fraction (NF) of known nulling pulsars.
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Table 3 Continuation of Table 2.
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Table 4 Continuation of Tables 2 & 3.
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Table 5 Continuation of Tables 2, 3 & 4.
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Table 6 P\(_\mathrm{s}\) and B\(_\mathrm{s}\) of known nulling pulsars for which no NF estimates are available.
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Table 7 Continuation of Table 6.
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Table 8 P\(_\mathrm{s}\) and B\(_\mathrm{s}\) of known Intermittent Pulsars.
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Konar, S., Deka, U. Radio pulsar sub-populations (I): The curious case of nulling pulsars. J Astrophys Astron 40, 42 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-019-9608-z

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