Radio polarisation properties of neutron stars

The defining characteristic of radio pulsars is their periodic pulses which can be detected by radio telescopes. The stars that generate these radio pulses are neutron stars, super dense stars with a mass of ~1.5 solar masses and a radius of only ~10 km. Radio pulsars accelerate particles to relativistic speeds which then move along the field lines of their extremely strong magnetic fields. As the beam of radio emission that these particles generates sweeps across the Earth (like a "light house") we expect it to describe a specific change in polarisation which can tell us details of the geometry of the pulsar, including the location of its rotation and magnetic axes, however it turns out to be more complicated than this and is giving us a glimpse of the electrodynamics of the emission process itself. In this project you will investigate the polarization properties of pulsars. You will start with data from the Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, making full use of its new polarization capability. This will be supplemented with data from the Parkes telescope in Australia and LOFAR, a large next generation array of radio telescopes operating at very low frequencies. This project involves data analysis and building a computer model describing the physics of the pulsar magnetosphere, which will include various relativistic effects. The model will be used to provide a self-consistent picture which can describe your data, for which the currently oversimplified "standard" model fails.