The research reports fell broadly into four main areas:
1. Large Scale Searches. These still occupy a prominent place in the research programmes of many observatories - rightly so considering that the past 5 years has seen the number of known pulsars increase by over 50% to about 750. Various groups are now beginning to use new techniques (multi-beam; very high frequency; extremely fast sampling) in addition to old tried and tested methods to find yet more of these fascinating objects.
2. Radio Pulse Timing. This area continues to provide exciting (and in many cases unexpected and as yet unexplained) results; for example, observations of the periastron passage and eclipse of the pulsar with a Be star companion provide a wealth of data on circumstellar disks; the observations of giant pulses (an extremely rare occurence in any case) in the most rapidly rotating millisecond pulsar known, are presumably a clue to emission mechanisms and may provude better timing precision than possible until now.
3. Instumentation development. This is of paramount importance - we heard of the improvement to the timing hardware in Effelsberg (MPIfR); new search hardware (Jodrell, Westerbork, MPIfR, Bologna); and a new X-ray satellite (SAX) that may be used for pulsar studies.
4. Emission mechanisms. A complete understanding of the physical processes responsible for pulsar emission still eludes us. Nevertheless, in this meeting we learned from the theorists of several attempts to make progress in this area, and of many new high-frequency observations that are relevant to the problem.
At the end of the meeting it was clear from the present status of the network that its future prospects and potential are extremely promising. We look forward to meeting our colleagues at similar EPN meetings in the near future.
Click here to view the talk abstracts.