Improving DM estimates using low-frequency scattering-broadening estimates

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.16765
• Publication Date: 2024-10-22
• Authors: Jaikhomba Singha; Bhal Chandra Joshi; M A Krishnakumar; Fazal Kareem; Adarsh Bathula; Churchil Dwivedi; Shebin Jose Jacob; Shantanu Desai; Pratik Tarafdar; P Arumugam; Swetha Arumugam; Manjari Bagchi; Neelam Dhanda Batra; Subhajit Dandapat; Debabrata Deb; Jyotijwal Debnath; A Gopakumar; Yashwant Gupta; Shinnosuke Hisano; Ryo Kato; Tomonosuke Kikunaga; Piyush Marmat; K Nobleson; Avinash K Paladi; Arul Pandian B.; Thiagaraj Prabu; Prerna Rana; Aman Srivastava; Mayuresh Surnis; Abhimanyu Susobhanan; Keitaro Takahashi
• Keywords: FOS: Physical sciences; Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics; Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)

ABSTRACT A pulsar’s pulse profile gets broadened at low frequencies due to dispersion along the line of sight or due to multipath propagation. The dynamic nature of the interstellar medium makes both of these effects time-dependent and introduces slowly varying time delays in the measured times-of-arrival similar to those introduced by passing gravitational waves. In this article, we present an improved method to correct for such delays by obtaining unbiased dispersion measure (DM) measurements by using low-frequency estimates of the scattering parameters. We evaluate this method by comparing the obtained DM estimates with those, where scatter-broadening is ignored using simulated data. A bias is seen in the estimated DMs for simulated data with pulse-broadening with a larger variability for a data set with a variable frequency scaling index, $\alpha$, as compared to that assuming a Kolmogorov turbulence. Application of the proposed method removes this bias robustly for data with band averaged signal-to-noise ratio larger than 100. We report the measurements of the scatter-broadening time and $\alpha$ from analysis of PSR J1643$-$1224, observed with upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope as part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array experiment. These scattering parameters were found to vary with epoch and $\alpha$ was different from that expected for Kolmogorov turbulence. Finally, we present the DM time-series after application of this technique to PSR J1643$-$1224.