Finding binary millisecond pulsars with the Hough transform

Abstract

The Hough transformation has been used successfully for more than four decades. Originally used for tracking particle traces in bubble chamber images, this work shows a novel approach turning the initial idea into a powerful tool to incoherently detect millisecond pulsars in binary orbits. This poster presents the method used, a discussion on how to treat the time domain data from radio receivers and create the input "image" for the Hough transformation, details about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, and finally some results from pulsars in 47 Tucanae.