Long-Term Scintillation Studies of Pulsars: II. Refractive Effects and the Spectrum of Plasma Density Fluctuations

Abstract

Refractive scintillation effects are powerful techniques for discriminating between different models proposed for the electron density fluctuation spectrum in the ISM. Data from our long-term scintillation study of 18 pulsars in the DM range 3-35 pc cm^{-3} (Paper I) are used to investigate two important observable effects of refractive scintillation: (i) modulations of DISS observables and flux, and (ii) drifting bands. Our data provide simultaneous measurements of decorrelation bandwidth, scintillation time scale, flux density and drift slope of patterns. The observed modulations of the first 3 are compared with the theoretical predictions, and constraints are placed on the density spectral form. The measured modulation indices are larger than predicted by a Kolmogorov form. Measurements of drift slopes and DISS parameters are used to independently estimate the slope of the density spectrum, which is found to be consistent with a Kolmogorov form for several pulsars.The contradictory results from these 2 independent methods are not reconcilable with the simple theoretical models. Our observations show anomalous behaviour like persistent drifting bands for some pulsars.This can be interpreted as an excess power in the low wavenumber range (~10^{-12} - 10^{-13} m^{-1}) compared to the Kolmogorov expectations or the existence of localized density structures.The results from our observations and those from the earlier studies are examined for understanding the overall nature of the density spectrum.The emerging picture is a Kolmogorov-like form in the wavenumber range ~10^{-6} m^{-1} to ~10^{-11} m^{-1}, which either steepens or has a bump near ~ 10^{-12} - 10^{-13} m^{-1}. We also discuss possible implications of our results for the current theoretical models.