Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Deconstructing Pulsar Scintillations

Ue-Li Pen

CITA

Pulsars scintillate due to interstellar propagation effects. The origin of these scintillations has posed challenges to fundamental physics, leading to proposed solutions ranging from quark nuggets to exotic dark matter and cosmic strings. We argue that multi frequency multi epoch VLBI may resolve these challenges, and lead to substantial improvement in gravity wave detection sensitivity.