2024/04/16 by S. Johnston, Dipanjan Mitra, Johnston, Simon +7 · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.10254
openalex publication_date 2024/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The S-shaped swing of the linear polarization position angle (PPA) observed in many pulsars can be interpreted by the rotating vector model (RVM). However, efforts to fit the RVM for a large sample of pulsars observed with the MeerKAT telescope as a part of the Thousand-Pulsar-Array (TPA) programme, only succeeded for about half the cases. High time-resolution studies suggest that the failed cases arise due to the presence of orthogonal polarization modes, or highly disordered distribution of PPA points. One such example is PSR~J1645-0317. Recently it has been shown that the RVM can be recovered in this pulsar by using only time samples which are greater than 80% linearly polarized. In this work we test this novel approach on the brightest 249 pulsars from the TPA sample, of which 177 yield sufficient highly polarized samples to be amenable to our method. Remarkably, only 9 of these pulsars (5%) now fail to fit the RVM as opposed to 59% from the original analysis. This result favours the paradigm that the underlying mechanism is coherent curvature radiation.