The Green Bank Telescope Pulsar Spigot

Abstract

We describe the design, implementation, and usage of a new facility pulsar search and timing instrument for the 100 m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). This instrument, known as the Pulsar Spigot, makes use of the extremely flexible digital correlator at the GBT to perform rapid autocorrelations (as fast as 2.56 mus) across wide bandwidths (up to 800 MHz) with large numbers of lags (up to 4096), using as many as four simultaneous frequency bands. Successful observations using this instrument have been conducted over the past year and have already resulted in a number of newly discovered pulsars and detailed studies of individual pulsars.