Searching for pulsars in close circular binary systems

Abstract

We present a detailed mathematical analysis of the Fourier response of binary pulsar signals whose frequencies are modulated by circular orbital motion. The fluctuation power spectrum of such signals is found to be νorb-periodic over a compact frequency range, where νorb denotes orbital frequency: Subsequently, we consider a wide range of binary systems with circular orbits and short orbital periods, and present a Partial Coherence Recovery Technique for searching for binary millisecond X-ray and radio pulsars. We use numerical simulations to investigate the detectability of pulsars in such systems with Porb ≲ 6 hours, using this technique and three widely used pulsar search methods. These simulations demonstrate that the Partial Coherence Recovery Technique is on average several times more sensitive at detecting pulsars in close binary systems when the data span is more than 2 orbital periods. The systems one may find using such a method can be used to improve the constraints on the coalescence rate of compact objects and they also represent those systems most likely to be detected with gravitational wave detectors such as LISA.