Hunting for Gravitational Waves from the Southern Hemisphere: the PuMA program

• Speaker:  Valentina Fiscella
• Start Time: 10/08/2021 - 12:00
• End Time:  10/08/2021 - 13:00
• Location:  Zoom
• Type: Lunch Talk

The Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy (IAR) is equipped with two single-dish, 30-m radio antennas. The Pulsar Monitoring in Argentina (http://puma.iar.unlp.edu.ar/) collaboration in using these to perform daily observations of pulsars in the southern hemisphere. We focus on contributing to pulsar timing studies related to short time-scale interstellar scintillation and searches for sources of continuous gravitational waves. In particular, we used daily observations of PSR J0437-4715 over a year to search for continuous gravitational waves, setting constraints in the nHz-μHz frequency range. More recently, we have applied machine learning techniques to analyze and cluster single-pulses of the Vela Pulsar, thereby obtaining an insight into the pulsar’s magnetosphere and preparing the ground for a single-pulse timing analysis. As a result of this work, we demonstrate IAR's potential for contributing to increase the sensitivity of the existing pulsar timing arrays.