Creating pulsar pulse profiles

What you will learn

You will learn how you can generate pulse profiles for pulsars.

Some of the gamma-ray sources in our Galaxy are pulsars, and eventually you want to study their pulse profiles in the MeV band using COMPTEL data. You do this using the compulbin script that generates a pulse profile FITS file. Below an example of how you can do this for the Crab pulsar.

$ compulbin
Input observation definition file [obs.xml]
Pulsar name [PSR B0531+21]
Pulsar ephemerides file [$CTOOLS/share/models/ephem_xte.psrtime]
Minimum energy (MeV) (0.05-50.0) [0.75]
Maximum energy (MeV) (0.05-50.0) [30.0]
Number of phase bins (1-200) [33]
Output pulsar phase bins file [pulsar.fits]

On output, compulbin creates a pulse profile FITS file that is displayed in the figure below.

../../../_images/pulsar.png

Crab pulsar pulse profile for viewing period 0001