Timing Young, Energetic Pulsars

Margaret Anne Livingstone

Pulsars are typically known for their extremely rapid and stable rotation - there is some talk of using pulsars to replace atomic clocks. While `recycled' millisecond pulsars are surprisingly stable rotators, there is another class of pulsars which are relatively unstable rotators. Young, energetic pulsars are known to exhibit low-frequency `timing' noise, and `glitches' - a sudden increase in pulse frequency. While these instabilities prohibit the use of these pulsars as clocks, they do allow a probe of the physics that underlies pulsar rotation and structure. Young pulsars also show the fastest spin-down rates of pulsars, which allows for tests of the spin-down model and thus the electrodynamics governing pulsar rotation.

In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to pulsars, explain the process of pulsar timing and discuss why timing young, energetic pulsars is not a waste of my time. Time permitting, I will also try to give some insight into my own research and present results that will be appearing in an upcoming paper, `21 years of Timing PSR B1509-58' (Livingstone et al. 2004)