New algorithms for radio pulsar search

Abstract

The computational cost of searching for new pulsars is a limiting factor for upcoming radio telescopes such as SKA. We introduce four new algorithms: an optimal constant-period search, a coherent tree search which permits optimal searching with O(1) cost per model, a semicoherent search which combines information from coherent subsearches while preserving as much phase information as possible, and a hierarchical search which interpolates between the coherent and semicoherent limits. Taken together, these algorithms improve the computational cost of pulsar search by several orders of magnitude. In this paper, we consider the simple case of a constant-acceleration phase model, but our methods should generalize to more complex search spaces.