Effect of Spacetime Curvature and Rotation on Arrival Times of Pulses from Fast Pulsars

Abstract

General relativistic effects, due to spacetime curvature and rotation, on the arrival times of pulsar signals are investigated using a rotationally perturbed spherical metric. For the millisecond pulsar PSR 1937 + 214, the advancement in arrival time (assuming the usual polar cap model for emission mechanism and a radius-to-frequency mapping) due to these effects is found to be nontrivial. The results are compared with recent multifrequency timing measurements on PSR 1937 + 214, and the implications regarding emission region thickness and emission mechanism for fast pulsars are discussed. 19 references.