December 19, 2008: Here is the 'Pulsar search consortium' MoU.

May 6, 2008: Here is Nancay's current requestfor telescope time for the GLAST LAT pulsar timing campaign. 

March 9, 2008: Update of the "pulsar timing MoU", now called LAT-0947-01. Late April -- we got all of the signatures!

March 4, 2008:  Here is version 3 of the "GLAST LAT Memo of Understanding of a  Pulsar Timing Consortium" which was circulated to the people listed on page 6 of the document on February 23rd. Here is Changes3to4.txt which is some modifications that were suggested by LAT leadership in a telecon a few days after that. Since then there has been considerable discussion resulting in a finite list of changes likely to be made in the next week or so: to cite two -- Mallory Roberts lead a series of e-mail exchanges ; and Scott Ransom lead a discussion of the topic at the Glast User's Group meeting yesterday. Several pulsar PI's have agreed to sign the document in more or less its present form.

A little background -- without going back to 2001 or 2002 when the LAT team and pulsar scientists laid the groundwork for all this, and without going back to a splinter session on the topic held at the IAU general assembly in Prague in the summer of 2006, I'll just say that on February 6th I (= David Smith) circulated a draft of an A&A article called "Pulsar Timing for the GLAST LAT". It describes the science motivation for gamma ray pulsars and the need for a sustained timing campaign to achieve that science. It lists 231 gamma pulsar candidates (Edot > 1E34 erg/s) that Simon Johnston has argued should be 225. About half of the article is tests of the LAT pulsar "Science Tools" software applied to various data sets. We (= a few senior LAT and pulsar people) built an author list of pulsar timers and LAT people. We suggested that agreeing to sign the A&A would amount to committing to the "timing consortium" the rules of which were only roughly described. By wide acclaim, we quickly separated that particular paper from the consortium constitution, and the MoU was born. Achieving consensus on its contents took the rest of February and has bled into March.

 I'm uneasy about posting a multi-author draft of an A&A on a public web site while corrections are still in progress. Contact me if you want to see it (me = smith@cenbg.in2p3.fr).

January 2008: VERITAS held a collaboration meeting in Tuscon last month. They asked John Millis of Purdue University to be the point-of-contact to the LAT collaboration for timing ephemerides. John is a graduate student working with John Finley. The e-mail address is john.millis@gmail.com . Millis and Bordeaux have begun exchanging file formats and a few selected timing solutions.

May 25, 2007: Marcos Moya Lopez visited Bordeaux these last few weeks. With Damien, he wrote a note discussing which known pulsars are really the best candidates, which you can find here.

February 6, 2007: While at Stanford for the 1st GLAST Symposium, a meeting was held. Romani recapitulated needs and tactics.  Lyne showed slides summarzing Jodrell observations for GLAST. Johnston spoke of Parkes observations (his rough notes here). Smith spoke of Nancay observations (see slides, Feb 2, below). Ransom and others intend to request GBT and/or Arecibo time for the radio-faint but gamma-likely targets. McLaughlin will use the 140' telescope to time noisier, louder gamma candidates. The consensus was that the timing needs for GLAST are on track for being met, even if much work remains to be done. (Attendees: Andrew Lyne, Simon Johnston, Scott Ransom, Maura McLaughlin, Mallory Roberts, Jim Cordes, Alberto Carramiñana, Roger Romani, Dave Thompson, Steve Thorsett, Peter Michelson, Steve Ritz, Denis Dumora, David Smith.)

February 21, 2007: Abstract for Kes 75 pulsar timing proposal with RXTE

February 21, 2007: Abstract for LMC pulsar timing proposal with RXTE

February 3, 2007: Here are two abstracts of RXTE proposals submitted by Livingstone & Kaspi of McGill University. 

February 2, 2007: (Lucas Guillemot)  GLAST pulsars.pdfThese slides summarize the current status of radio timing for GLAST in the northern and  southern skies. It also deals with the problem of the distribution of pulsar observations.

Pulsars of Greatest Interest to the LAT Collaboration

Spreadsheet with this list

fvel - Ranked by "expected gamma-ray flux" normalized to Vela
srad - radio flux
time req - estimated radio time for timing detection
visits per y - estimated number of observations per year to maintain timing
time per y - total radio telescope hours estimated per year
G - time with gamma rays
X - time with X-rays
M - ms pulsar of special interest. (0.001) in time per y - ms pulsar
Must-do PSR - Edot > 3E34
Worthwhile PSR - 3E34 > Edot > 1E34