MPIfR Pulsar Group

Research into pulsars has been a major activity at Bonn since the early 1970s. Deep at the heart of our group is a large database of pulsar observations made with many telescopes around the world, including the Effelsberg radio telescope. In addition to the standard pulsar backend at Effelsberg, the array of hardware we use is continually expanding. The latest addition is a coherent dedispersion machine for high precision timing and polarimetric measurements of millisecond pulsars. An example of the machine's capabilities is the profile of the 1.5578 ms pulsar B1937+21 shown below. Our most active research area is high frequency (> 1.4 GHz) observations of pulsars, in particular: spectra, polarisation and profiles; high-precision timing; polarimetry of millisecond pulsars as well as pulsar searches.