Simulation of Interstellar Scattering Effects on Pulsar Timing

Abstract

A computer simulation has been devised to study the effects of interstellar scattering on pulsar pulse times-of-arrival using a one-dimensional power-law phase screen. The motivation for this study is to understand the limits on pulsar timing imposed by interstellar scattering (ISS). For a given model of the electron density spectrum, multi-frequency timing observations may be able to remove the plasma propagation effects. Removal of these effects is necessary to obtain sub-microsecond timing estimation of pulsar proper motion, parallactic distance, and other effects. In this paper we present some of our preliminary results.