Unlocking the hidden potential of pulsar astronomy

Abstract

Pulsars have traditionally been used for research into fundamental physics and astronomy. In this paper, we investigate the expanding applications of radio pulsars in societal and industrial domains beyond their conventional scientific roles. We describe emerging applications in positioning, navigation, timing and synchronization, random number generation, space weather monitoring, public engagement, antenna calibration techniques, and leveraging extensive pulsar data sets generated by large-scale observatories. Such pulsar data sets have already been used to demonstrate quantum-computing algorithms. We evaluate the potential for compact radio receiver systems for pulsar detection by describing optimal observing bands. We show that relatively simple and compact receiver systems can detect the brightest pulsar, Vela. The equivalent of an ~4m-diameter dish with a small bandwidth operating around 700 MHz would be able to detect many more pulsars. Such a detector would be able to localise itself to around 10 km using pulsar navigation techniques. The space weather community requires direct measurements of the integrated electron density at a range of solar elongations. The only method to get model-independent values is through pulsar observations and we explore the possibility of measuring dispersion measures (DMs) and rotation measures with a range of telescopes (observing from low to mid-frequencies) as well as using a typical model to predict the variation of the DM as a function of solar radii. We review how pulsars can be used to produce random sequences and demonstrate that such sequences can be produced using the scintillation properties of pulsars as well as from pulse jitter.